LIB RARY OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf..pii.$il^g| 

UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA, 



CONTENTS. 



The Truth of History - - - 5 
Some Medieval Issues 

1. The Dark Ages . . . 10 

2. Christianity as a Civilizer - - 24 

3. The Monks of Old - - a3 

4. The Papal Power - - - 43 

5. The Crusades - - - 59 

6. Premature Protestantisms - - 67 

7. Bibles Before Luther - .- 78 

8. The Revival of Learning - - 86 

Events of Protestantism 

1. Indulgences - - - - 95 

• 2. Cause AND Success OF Protesta>tism. 109 

3. Character of the Reformers - 119 

4. The Reformation and Tolerance - 124 

5. The Reformation and Civil Liberty 139 

6. Two Political Theories of the Time 146 

7. The Reformation and Literature 151 

8. Mary and Elizabeth - - - 158 

9. The Inquisition - - - 164 

10. The Jesuits . . . . 175 

11. St. Bartholomew's Day - - 190 

12. Galileo - - - - - 201 

13. Guy Fawkes AND Titus Oates - 211 



NOTE. 



The plan pursued in the following pages is to give, under 
each topic, a succinct statement of the facts — embodying the 
leading points of information necessary to a clear view: 
and to follow this with quotations from some well known 
historians — indicating briefly their judgment upon the whole 
case or upon controverted points thereof. 



THE TRUTH OF HISTORY. 



REFEREIXG to contemj)orary accounts 
of the famous ''Popish plot.** Macau- 
lay indicates something of the evolution of 
T)artisan history by remarking: "These 
stories [one of which represented that the 
Catholics started the great London fire of 
1666] are now altogether exioloded. They 
have been abandoned by statesmen to 
aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by 
clergymen to old women, and by old women 
to Sir Harcourt Lees." 

There are other stories which have also 
gotten down to the credulity of Sir Harcourt 
Lees or his counterparts in our generation. 
It is scarcely necessary to allude to them 
here; they have passed from history to 
controversy, from controversy to legendary, 
and from legendary to a place beside the 
narratives of Baron Munchausen and the 



6 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



escapades of Little Red Eidin^^ Hood. There 
are historical traditions, however, that are 
in the process, and not so far advanced as 
these. Aldermen yet believe them. Clergy- 
men (sad to say) tell them. Or, if given up 
in such quarters, old women still pin their 
faith to them; and make them the material 
for nursery yarns to bias the minds of 
children, and unconsciously affect the adult 
judgment in after years. 

The truth of history is most commonly 
tampered with, not by pure inventions, but 
rather in matters of more or less plausibility 
concerning the details — which color events; 
or going to the question of motives — which 
determine the credit or the guilt of acts and 
occurrences.* 

* As Prof. Protbero recently said at Edinburgli University : 
"Take any great movement you please — the Crusades, for 
instance, or the Reformation; analyze it as minutely as 
possible, ascertain all its conditions, its general causes, its 
immediate occasions — there remains the incalculable human 
element, which defies the processes of exact science. We 
cannot be certain of this man's motives, nor measure the 
influence which that man exerted. The human element in 
the subject calls out the human element in the student. Not 



THE TRUTH OF HISTOEY. 



7 



A careful sifting process is necessary 
to get at the undoubted facts in all 
controverted cases, and, as the ordinary 
reader cannot afford the time or expense of 
original investigation and research, it seems 
a more practical course to call in the rep- 
utable historians^ of all schools and sects, 
and from their testimony to get as near to 
the truth as possible.* 

We must not permit ourselves to be the 
dupes of those fierce partisans who lived in 
other ages and wished their opponents to be 
misjudged by posterity. We are not properly 
part of this elder age of the world unless we 
share its maturer judgment; and unless we 
possess its ability of seeing through the 
one-sided details presented by the skilled 

only is the investigation obscured, but the sympathies of 
the investigator are aroused, and his judgment is liable to 
be warped at every turn. History alone suffers from this 
doubly-distorting medium. Other sciences are free from its 
effects." 

* "Historic truth never can be elicited save by comparison," 
says Sir Francis Palgrave.— (History of Normandy and 
England. Preface.) 



8 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTOEY. 



apologists of parties and sects in iess 
instructed centuries to defend their actions 
or asperse the conduct of their adversaries. 

Neither do we want to inherit the partisan 
prejudices of conflicts waged in former 
centuries. Our condition for a cooler and 
more deliberate judgment is better, and our 
perspective for giving the facts their just 
imi3ortance is also better. We must not 
have the opinions of angry, uncharitable, 
unwise men forced upon us; but we must 
seek for ourselves the broad, dispassionate, 
accurate view that alone can make the 
lessons of the jpast helpful. Our loyalty to 
Truth is above all loyalty to any institution 
or party, past or x^resent. 

In a survey of a series of controverted 
historical topics, this will occur as a safe 
method of x^rocedure: 

1. What are the facts of the case, as fairly 
conceded by all sides? 

2. What is a just estimate from a general 
survey of the matter, on the basis of these 
facts? 



THE TRUTH OF HISTORY. 



9 



3. Is this estimate borne out by the 
opinions of historians who are ranged, so 
far as the general issue goes, on the other 
side? If that be the case, then the facts 
and the conclusions may be regarded as 
reasonably certain. 



THE ''DARK AGES." 



IT has been pertinently said, that the 
'darkness' of certain mediaeval centuries 
is all in the minds of the xoersons applying the 
term. From those distant shores of the past, 
very few echoes reach us in these latter years 
of the nineteenth century. Superficial 
observation has concluded that there was 
4ittle going on,' and that the entire popu- 
lation was, as the phrase is, ''sunk in 
ignorance," not to mention "superstition" 
and "barbarism." 

Tallyrand's notion that history is "a 
conspiracy against truth" receives some 
illustration in this attitude towards the 
middle ages. "A dead set," says Sir Francis 
Palgrave, "has been made against the middle 
ages as periods immersed in darkness, 
ignorance and barbarity. But, most of all, 
have these censures been directed against 



THE ''DARK AGES." 



11 



mediaeval Christianity.*'^' Fleury indicates 
that this conspiracy to blacken the middle 
ages began with the Humanists of the 
Renaissance period. Their movemcDt was a 
reaction against the old learning; to com- 
mend the new tone they wished to impart 
to civilization, it was necessary to deprecate 
the old. The Reformation readily adopted 
the same unfavorable view; and the skeptical 
writers of the eighteenth century had a 
natural antipathy to ages dominated, as the 
mediaeval centuries were, by Christianity. 
The more researchful historian of the 
nineteenth century has been disturbing this 
censorious judgment against the middle 
ages, by manifesting a disposition to go over 
the grounds again in a more scientific spirit. 

The term "dark ages" has been deemed 
comprehensive enough to cover the ninth, 
tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. The 
masses in those ages could not read or write. 
We find hi legal instruments of the time: 
"And the aforesaid lord hath declared, that 



* Historj^ of Normandy and England. (Preface.) 



]2 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



he does not know liovr to sign his name 
owing to the fact of his being a nobleman.*' 
And a knight being asked to read the 
Scriptures, retorted: "T am not a clerk; I 
have a family to supiDort." 

Illiteracy, however, is not ignorance. Xor 
would inability to read, mean as much in the 
ninth century as it does in the nineteenth. 
Let the world of to-day lose the ''art 
preservative of all the arts" — printing; let 
the newspaper vanish from the land, and 
the cheaxD school book be a thing of the 
past: throw us back to the condition of 
manuscript books, multiplied slowly and 
painfully: and instead of five million illite- 
rates, such as we have to-day in this land of 
light and progress, we might have twenty 
or thirty millions. 

The illiterate xjeople in the ages previous 
to the invention of printing were more 
intelligent, in their time, than are the 
illiterate of to-day. To be unable to read 
now-a-days means backwardness, neglect 
of opportunities, and stuiDidity. Quite the 



THE ''DAEK ages.* 



13 



contrary in the mediteYal eijocli: Illiteracy 
was excusable, and, in a certain sense, 
fashionable, inasmuch as it was a common 
necessity. The naturally intelligent, who 
in our day would be common-schooled,*' 
were, in that epoch, illiterate. 

Another consideration that must be borne 
in mind in instituting comparisons between 
the ninth and the nineteenth century, is the 
circumstances of mediaeval civilization. 
For over two centuries (to A. D. 650) 
civilized Europe was the field of successive 
waves of barbarian conquest. Franks, 
Groths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Yandals, Alans, 
Huns and Lombards followed each other 
with destructive incursions. One wave 
pushed the other further on. The barba- 
rians apparently did not conquer for the 
purpose of occupying the soil and building 
up empires, but for the purpose of plunder. 
The condition was consequently one of 
continued commotion through several gen- 
erations. The case of the Vandals is in point : 
they pushed through France and settled for 



14 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



a time in Spain; later, 80,000 of tliem 
crossed, under Genseric, to Carthage, where 
a Vandal empire was established for almost 
a century; and the Vandals, organized as 
pirates, came down upon the commerce of 
the Mediteranian and even returned to deso- 
late Rome. Attila inflicted himself as the 
'^scourge of God" upon Christian Europe. 
The Northmen broke the calm after the other 
barbarians had subsided, and the Moslem 
invasion from the South was only checked by 
Charles Martel after a desperate fight (A. 
D. 732). The assimilation of ten successive 
waves of northern barbarians, — savages from 
the woods, — and the blow^s such invasions 
meant to existing and civilizing institutions 
made the task of mediaeval society most 
difficult and gradual. 

Civilization had, in fact, to be begun over. 
We do not call a boy decrepit because he 
lacks the strength of a man. Neither ought 
we to slur the society of the tenth 
century as ''dark" and "ignorant" because 
it did not rapidly attain the standard of our 



THE ^'DAEK AGES. 



15 



day. There is no responsibility where the 
conditions are natural and inexorable. The 
mediaeval centuries were constantly forcing 
the civilization and culture of European 
society forward. It was the germinating 
epoch of the modern world. There was no 
standing still; no retrogression. There was 
constant advance. In the epoch that, in the 
retrospect seems most hopeless and unx)ro- 
gressive, i. e., about the close of the tenth 
century, three conspicuous inventions were 
made that the modern world finds of 
indispensable value: Clocks were devised 
by the monk Gerbert, the musical scale by 
the monk Guy, and the manufacture of 
paper from rags was first attempted. Com- 
mon schools for the masses date even a 
little earlier, and some of the great uni- 
versities of modern Euroi3e were founded 
in the spirit of improvement that strongly 
evinced itself. 

The nineteenth century goes back to the 
eleventh to admire the magnificent Gothic 
architecture that flourished in that eijoch, 



16 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



leaving monuments that are copied in the 
finest temples of to-day. And the state of 
architecture has been shrewdly accepted by 
historians as one of the safest gauges of the 
progress attained in the other arts. 



''Abstractedly from all the influences 
which we have sustained in common w^ith 
the rest of the civilized commonwealth, our 
British disparagement of the middle ages 
has been exceedingly enhanced by our 
grizzled ecclesiastical or church historians 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
^ ^ These 'standard works,' accepted 
and received as canonical books, have 
tainted the nobility of our national mind. 
An adequate parallel to their bitterness, 
their shabbiness, their shirking, their hab- 
itual disregard of honor and veracity, is 
hardly afforded, even by the so-called "Anti- 
JacohiiV^ press during the revolutionary and 
imi^erial wars. The history of Napoleon, his 
generals, and the French nation, collected 
from these exaggerations of selfish loyalty. 



THE ''DAEK ages.* 



17 



rabid aversion, and iDanic terror, would be 
the match of our xoopular and prevailing 
ideas concerning Hildebrand. or Anselm, or 
Becket, or Innocent III., or mediteval 
Catholicity in general, grounded upon 
our ancestral traditionary 'Standard eccle- 
siastical authorities." such as Burnett's 
'Reformation,' or Fox's 'Book of Martyrs.' ^ 
* "The scheme of, and intent of, mediaeval 
Catholicity was to render faith the all- 
actuating and all-controlling vitality. ^ * 
So far as the system extended, it had the 
effect of connecting every social element with 
Christianity. And Christianity being thus 
wrought up into the mediaeval system, every 
medieval institution, character or mode of 
thought afforded the means or vehicle for 
the villification of Christianity. Xever do 
these writers, or their school, whether in 
France or in Great Britain, Toltaire or 
Mably, Hume, Robertson, or Henry, treat 
the clergy or the Church with fairness — 
not even with comxmon honesty. If histor- 
ical notoriety enforces the allowance of any 



18 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



merit to a priest, the effect of this extorted 
acknovvledgment is destroyed by a happy 
turn, a clever insinuation, or a coarse 
innuendo. Consult, for example, Hume, 
when compelled to notice Archbishop 
Langton's exertions in procuring the 
concession of the Magna Charta; and Henry, 
narrating the communications which passed 
between Gregory the Great and Saint 
Austin." 

Sir Francis Palgrave's History of Normandy and En- 
gland. London, MacMiUan & Co., 1878. (Preface, xiv-viii.) 

^'I cannot help wishing that the reader 
who has formed his idea of the dark ages 
only from some modern popular writers — I 
do not mean those who have written 
professedly on the subject — could be at once 
fairly thrown back into the midst of them. 
I cannot help thinking that he would feel 
very much as I did the first time that I 
found myself in a foreign country. A 
thousand novelties attracted my attention. 
* ^ Well, and these old folks of the dark 



THE "dark ages." 



19 



ages were our grandfathers and grand- 
mothers; and, in a good many points, vastly 
like ourselves, though we may not at first 
see the resemblance in the few smoky family 
pictures which have come down to us; but 
'^had they not eyes?" had they "not hands, 
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, pas- 
sions, fed with the same food, hurt with 
the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed 
and cooled by the same winter and summer" 
as we are? "Yes; but they knew nothing." 
Well, then it is strange to think how they 
could do and say so much as they did 
without any knovv^ledge. 

"The Dark Ages," by Dr. Maitland, pp. 30-31. (London. 
John Hodges, Pub., 1890.) 

"In the middle age, however, as in 
antiquity, the era of the foundation of 
states and nations, the era of legislation 
preceded that of the arts and of general 
refinement. ^ * Of ignorance, however, 
and defective civilization, it is scarcely 



20 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



possible to accuse an age wherein the 
Mediterranean was covered with ships as 
richly lad.en and its coasts, by commercial 
cities as prosi3eroiis and powerful, as the 
most flourishing epoch of Greece. * * 
an age wherein architecture soared with 
a new flight and painting attained such 
high and hitherto unparalleled develop- 
ment and perfection; an age wherein 
philosophy almost too widely cultivated, 
became an affair of state and practical life, 
wherein all the historical and literary 
knowledge, which was at that time by any 
channels accessible, was pursued with 
passionate eagerness and desire, when 
natural science and mathematics were 
investigated and studied with untiring 
eagerness, until at last the two grand 
discoveries by which the mind of man 
attained its majority, the discovery of the 
new hemisphere and x^lanetary motions, 
that is, of the true magnitude of the heaven 



THE ''DAEK ages/' 



•21 



and earth, crowned the research and labors 
of centuries." 

A course of lectures on Modern History, Frederick 
Schlegel; edition of Boiin's Library, London. 1S49. Lectures 
9 and 10, pp. 118-9. 

'^lii modern Europe the middle ages were 
called the Dark Ages, ten centuries, from 
the fifth to the fifteenth. Who dares to call 
them so now? They gave us decimal num- 
bers, gunpowder, glass, chemistry, and Gothic 
architecture; and their paintings are the 
delight and tuition of our age. * * * The 
darkness of those times arises from our 
own want of information, not from the 
absence of intelligence that distinguished 
them. Human thought was never more 
active and never joroduced greater results 
in any period of the world." 

Emerson, Oration at Harvard. 

''This glorious Elizabethan era, with its 
Shakespeare as the outcome and flower- 
age of all which had iDreceded it, is itself 
attributable to the Catholics of the middle 



22 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOKY. 



ages. The Christian faith, \vhich was the 
theme of Dante's song, had produced the 
practical life which Shakespeare was to 
sing." 

Carlyle, "Hero and Poet." 

''If the modern ecclesiastic should ever 
meet with a crop-eared monk of the tenth 
century, he may, if he pleases, laugh at him 
for not having read Virgil; but if he should 
himself be led to confess that, though a 
priest of Christ's Catholic church, and 
nourished in the languages of Greece and 
Rome till they were almost as familiar to 
him as his own, he had never read a single 
page of Chrysostom or Basil, of Augustine 
or Jerome, of Ambrose of Hilary — if he 
should confess this, I am of the opinion that 
the poor monk would cross himself, and 
make ofP without looking behind him." 

"The Dark Ages," by Dr. Maitland, p. 207. (London. John 
Hodges Pub., 1S90.) 

"The praise of having originally estab- 
lished schools belongs to some bishops and 



THE ''DAEK ages." 



23 



abbots of the sixth century. They came in 
place of the Imperial schools, overthrown by 
the barbarians. In the downfall of that 
temporal dominion, a spiritual aristocracy 
was providentially raised up, to save from 
extinction the remains of learning and of 
religion itself. Some of these schools seem 
to have been preserved in the south of Italy, 
though merely, perhaps, for elementary 
instruction. * ^ * The cathedral and con- 
ventual schools, created or restored by 
Charlemagne, became the means of pre- 
serving that small portion of learning 
which continued to exist. They flourished 
most, having had time to produce their 
fruits, under his successors, Louis, the 
Debonair, Lothaire, and Charles the Bald.'* 

Hallam's Intro, to Lit. 1,27. Xew York. (Harper Bros.. 
1842). 



CHRISTIANITY AS A CIVILIZER. 



THE moral forces in society were all 
throughout the middle ages engaged 
in a stupendous labor of regeneration. 

1. In the pagan world, slavery was an 
established and unquestioned condition. 
Plato made it the topic of eulogy in his 
"Kepublic." But all the instincts of Chris- 
tianity were hostile to human bondage. ''It 
is not ordained," protested St. Augustine, 
''that man should rule over man; his 
dominion is solely over brute creation." 
Reiterated by the canons of the Church 
and in the writings of her schoolmen, 
these ideas slowly, but surely, undermined 
the custom of slavery. First by improving 
the condition of the slave, then by protect- 
ing his freedom when manumitted, and 
finally by making it a meritorious act to 
give freedom to serfs and to redeem captives, 



CHRISTIAXITY AS A CIVILIZER. 



25 



the Church accomplished a mighty stride 
in the path of human equality. 

2. The elevation of woman proceeded 
on a similar principle. Marriage was 
made a Sacrament and chastity a virtue. 
Monogamy was prescribed; polygamy, 
denounced. From being an inferior, the 
wife was raised to the position of a 
companion and an equal. So transcendent a 
change could have come only through 
powerful religious conviction. 

3. Chivalry was the efflorescence of this 
religious sentiment under the conditions of 
feudalism. Its cardinal principles were 
courage, gentleness of manner, and respect 
for sacred things. Undoubtedly, it operated 
as ' a most potent solvent against barbarism 
and the attributes of the rude warrior. 

4. The "Truce of God," originating in 
France about 1050, and spreading into 
Germany and England, was another device 
of the Church against the ferocity of the 
age. It was made ground for excommuni- 
cation to do battle on four days of the 



26 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



week (Thursday, Friday, Saturday and 
Sunday), corresponding' with the death 
and resurrection of Christ. Council after 
council reiterated this decree. A wonderful 
cessation of feudal strife and bloody knight 
errantry ensued as a consequence. 

5. The establishment of trade unions, 
guilds and corporations was one of the 
most progressive steps in the history of 
the middle ages. Religion had much to do 
with these associations; they bore the names 
of saints and respected certain Church 
holidays. Sandi, in his Civil History of 
Venice, counts over sixty trade corporations 
in that city at the beginning of the 
fifteenth century. The Hanseatic League 
was modeled after religious communities, 
even to the extent of enjoining celibacy. 

6. The influence of the Church was 
naturally exerted in favor of the poor and 
the decrepit. Hospitals were placed by the 
secular governments under the charge of 
bishops and religious orders, and asylums 
were respected as Church property. 



CHKISTIANITY AS A CIVILIZER. 27 



7. The mitigation of the criminal code, 
the restraint of tyranny, the protection of 
the weak as against the exactions of the 
strong, and the inculcation of gentle 
manners, were direct consequences of 
Christian teachings. The Sermon on the 
Mount was the great text of the mediaeval 
preacher. And, indeed, no lessons were 
more in demand and of more wholesome 
effect. 

"The authority of the priests operated in 
the darker ages as a salutary antidote. They 
prevented the total extinction of letters, 
mitigated the fierceness of the times, 
sheltered the poor and defenseless, and 
preserved or restored the peace and order 
of civil society." 

Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman 
Empire. Chap. 61. (Vol. VI. p. 230, Harper Bros. ed. 1880.) 

'•The extinction of the gladiatorial 
spectacle is, of all the results of early 
Christian influence, that upon which the 



28 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



historian can look with the deepest and 
most nnmingied satisfaction." 

Lecky's History of European Morals. Vol. II., Chap. 4, p. 
38. (D. Appleton & Co., 1877.) 

"The relations of rulers to their subjects, 
and of tribunals to the poor, were modified 
by the intervention of the Church. When 
Antioch was threatened with destruction on 
account of its rebellion against Theodosius, 
the anchorites poured forth from the 
neighboring deserts to intercede with the 
ministers of the Emperor, while Archbishop 
Flavian went himself as a suppliant to 
Rome. St. Ambrose imposed public pen- 
ance on Theodosius on account of the 
massacre of Thessalonica. Synesius excom- 
municated for his oppression a governor 
named Andronicus; and two French 
councils, in the sixth century, imposed 
the same penalty on all great men who 
arbitrarily ejected the poor. St. Abraham, 
St. Epiphanius and St. Basil are all said to 
have obtained the remission or reduction of 
oppressive imposts. To provide for the 



CHRISTIANITY AS A CIVILIZED. 29 



interest of the widows and orphans was 
part of the ecclesiastical duty, and a Council 
of Macon anathematized any ruler who 
brought them to trial without first apprising 
the Bishop of the diocese. A council of 
Toledo, in the fifth century, threatened, with 
excommunication all who robbed priests, 
monks, or poor men, or refused to listen to 
their expostulations. ^ * As time rolled on, 
charity assumed many forms, and every 
monastery became a centre from which it 
radiated. By the monks the nobles were 
overawed, the poor protected, the sick 
tended, travelers sheltered, prisoners ran- 
somed, the remotest spheres of suffering 
explored." 

Lecky's History of European Morals. Vol. 11. , Chap. 4, 
pp. 83-84 (Ed. of D. Appleton & Co. ISTT.) 

•'No society ever made greater efforts than 
the Christian Church did from the fifth to 
the tenth century to influence the world 
about it and to assimilate it to itself. When 
its history shall become the particular object 
of our examination we shall more clearly 



30 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



see what it attempted. It attacked, in a 
manner, barbarism at every point in order 
to civilize it and rule over it." 

Guizot's History of Ciyilization. (Vol. I. Lecture 3, p. 75.) 

''She [the Church] combated with much 
pertinacity and loerseverance the great vices 
of the social condition, x^articularly slavery. 

* ^ The church did not labor less 
worthily for the improvement of civil and 
criminal legislation. ^ ^ * Finally, she 
endeavored by every means in her power to 
suxDpress the frequent recourse which at this 
jDcriod was na d to violence, and the continual 
vrars to which society was so prone.'' 

Ouizot's History of Civilization. Lecture 6. 

''In no form of charity was the beneficial 
character of the Church more continually 
and more splendidly exercised than in re- 
deeming caj)tives from servitude." ^ ^ * 

"St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great. 
St. Caesarius of Aries, St. Exuperius of 
Toulouse, St. Hilary, St. Remy, all melted 
down or sold their church vessels to free 



CEEISTIAXITT AS A CIVILIZEE 



31 



prisoners. St. Cyprian sent a large sum 
for the same i)^'^iTose to the Bishop of 
Xicomedia. St. Epiphann.s and St. Avitus. 
in conjunction with a rich Gaulish lady 
named S^'agria. are said to have rescued 
thousands. St. Eloi devoted to this object his 
entire fortune. St. Paulinus of Xola, dis- 
played a similar generosity. * * When, 
long afterward, the Mohammedan concjuests 
in a measure reproduced the calamities of 
the barbarian invasions, the same unwearied 
charity was displayed. The Trinitarian 
monks,, founded by St. John of Matha, in 
the twelfth century, were devoted to the 
release of Christian ca^Dtives. and another 
society (Our Lady of Mercy) was founded 
with the same object in view by St. Peter 
Xolasco, in the following century." 

Lecky's History of European Morals, Vol. II. Chap. 4, 
(pp. 72-3) Ed. of D. Appleton k Co.. ISTT. 

Before the Reformation came, she [the 
Church] had enfranchised almost all the 
bondsmen in the Kingdom [England]. 

Macaulay's History of England. Vol. 1. pp. 33. 



32 



MOOTED QUESTIONS 



OF HISTOEY. 



"The feudal system Tvas an atomic condi- 
tion of iDolitical society. In this state of 
things, the Church, through its hierarchical 
organization under one chief, did a benefi- 
cent work for civilization, by fusing the 
peoples, as far as its influence went, into a 
single community and subjecting them to 
a uniform condition. The medieval papacy, 
whatever evils may have been connected 
with it, saved Europe from anarchy and 
lawlessness.*' 

History of the Eeformation. By George P. Fisher D. D., 
Prof, of Eccl. Hist, in Yale CoUege. Chap. 2, pp. 32. Ed. of 
Chas. Scribner &, Sons, 1SS3. 

^'The Church of the Middle Ages I do 
not consider a mitigated evil, but an incal- 
culable benefit to society. * * Even the 
papacy, as is shown, was in the mediaeval 
period in many respects a beneficial insti- 
tution." 

Fisher's History of the Eeformation. Prefatory Note to 
2d Edition, 1883. 



''THE MONKS OF OLD/' 
HATEYER view may now obtain 



VY respecting monasteries, there can 
be no doubt that "the monks of old'' 
enjoyed the average good opinion of their 
age. In times of violence the monastery 
lands were held inviolate ; the monk traveled 
without retinue. The avarice of the half 
X3agan nobility led to the suppression and 
spoliation of the rich monasteries at the 
time of the Reformation. But i3oi3ular favor 
was still on the side of the monks. Vvlien 
Henry Till, sought to stamp out the 
abbeys of England, all of the northern 
counties rose in rebellion. 

What are now called ''the extinct 
virtues," — voluntary j)overty, chastity, and 
obedience — were the monastic vows chiefly 
insisted ui^on until the sixth century. 
Then St. Benedict added the requirement 




34 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of manual labor, and among the rocks of 
Siibiaco, forty miles from Rome, the 
foundations were laid for the monasticism 
of history. 

1. The old monastic maxim which Car- 
lyle so much admired: '^labor is prayer," 
naturally yielded marked results. The monks 
improved the rude agricultural science of 
their age, bringing to their tasks in the field 
the keenness of study and contemplation. 
Immense tracts of land in the Hercynean 
woods, in the morasses of Holland, in the 
forests of Burgundy, and the fens of 
Lincolnshire, were caused to bloom as a 
garden by their labor. The most populous 
country in Europe to-day, stretches between 
St. Omers and Liege. It was formerly a 
marsh, transformed by cowled and hooded 
tillers. 

2. Cities and centers of population grew 
up about the fortresses of industry and 
peace established by monks. Under the 
shadow of the abbey, the husbandman was 
free from feudal rapacity. The etymology 



•'THE MONES OP OLD 



35 



of such place-names as Munich is 
sufficiently significant. 

3. The poor and vreak were the esx3ecial 
soiicitnde of the mediteval monasteries. 
England's "poor lavrs" date from the 
suppression of the abbeys. Prior to that 
time, this social burden and duty was 
discharged by organized church agencies. 
"The monks,*' says Edmund Burke, 'Vere 
the sole channel through which the bounty 
of the rich could reach the poor in any 
continued stream, and the peoi3le turned 
their eyes towards them in all distresses." 

•i. In times of barbarous forays, feudal 
warfare and social violence, the xDcaceful, 
contemxDlative and religious mind naturally 
sought a retreat for safety and kindred 
association. Weariness and adversity also 
craved a refuge. In this respect, monasteries 
were an inevitable x^roduct of the age. 

"O father abbot," says Wolsey in 

Shakespeare's play, 

'•An old man broken bv the storms of state 
Is come to lay his weary bones among you; 
Give him a little earth, for charity." 



36 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



5. Some of the '^great books" of the 
world were written in these mediasval 
retreats. ''The Imitation of Christ*' and 
the "Spiritual Combat," breathe of the 
solemn stillness and interior peace of 
monastery life. Our world may aspire to, 
but it can never quite realize, the 
contemplative spirit of those works. 

6. The literature of antiquity was safely- 
stored away in the monasteries until the 
period of the Renaissance. It was the labor 
of years to multiply the classical authors, 
but even in an age of manuscript books, 
rich libraries appertained to many abbeys. 
The thirty-two thousand MSS. in the great 
library at Paris are almost entirely in 
monkish handwriting. The Bible was 
copied and illuminated, and the annals 
and chronicles of every country were for 
several centuries recorded solely by monks. 

7. The schools of the middle ages were 
of monastic origin. The synods of the 
clergy and the capitularies of Charlemagne 
directed that schools should be opened in 



'"THE MONKS OF OLD ' 



37 



connection with the abbeys. Free common 
schools were an invention of the monks. 
The universities were a natural outgrowth. 
That of Paris, although sioringing from a 
small monastery school, had 30,000 students 
in the time of Abelard. The majority of 
existing European universities date from 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 

8. Quite naturally, minds educated in 
the monasteries began eventually to rule 
in the affairs of Church and State. Pope 
Gregory VIL, called Hildebrand, came 
from the monastery of Cluny to work a 
great revolution in ecclesiastical polity. 
Peter the Hermit drew all Europe into the 
Crusades. Lanfranc, Roger Bacon, and 
Thomas Aquinas, exercised an influence of 
the most far-reaching character upon the 
thought and temper of their times. 

9. Monopolizing the learning of the age, 
the monastery generally led the way in 
science and material progress. Alchemy, 
medicine, astronomy, geography and 
natural science were distinct tendencies of 



38 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



monastic studies in the fifteenth century. 
The numerous inventions made by monks 
— clocks, gunpowder, etc., are easily 
recalled. 

10. One is impressed with the necessity 
of organized forces in the work of civiliza- 
tion and Ohristianization, accomplished in 
the middle ages. There was an eternal 
fitness that the monasteries should 
undertake this mission. Fortresses of 
culture against barbarian invasions, they 
subsequently became centers from which 
missionaries issued forth to subjugate the 
world. A counter invasion was undertaken 
by surpliced monks in the very cradle of 
the Goths and Vandals. They penetrated 
Russia and Scandinavia, and built their 
outposts in Iceland and Greenland. 

Abuses, of course, crept in. Worldly- 
minded abbots were installed by the secular 
arm. Great wealth carried its inevitable 
temptations, and religion was disfigured by 
barbarism. But the sum total was progress, 



''the monks of old." 



39 



and the debt of society must be paid by a 
favorable and a liberal judgment. 

^'It is impossible to get even a superficial 
knowledge of the mediaeval history of 
Europe, without seeing how greatly the 
world of that period was indebted to the 
monastic orders; and feeling that, whether 
they were good or bad in other matters^ 
monasteries were beyond all price in those 
days of misrule and turbulence, as places 
where (it may be imperfectly, yet better 
than elsewhere ) Grod was worshipped — as a 
quiet and religious refuge for helpless 
infancy and old age, a shelter of respectful 
sympathy for the orphan maiden and the 
desolate widow — as central points whence 
agriculture was to spread over bleak hills, 
and barren downs, and marshy plains, and 
deal bread to millions perishing with hunger 
and its pestilential train — as repositories of 
the learning which then was, and well- 
springs of the learning that was to be; as 
nurseries of art and science, giving the 
stimulus, the means, and the reward to 



40 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



invention, and aggregating around them 
every head that could devise and every 
hand that could execute, — as the nucleus of 
the city which, in after days of pride, should 
crown its palaces and bulwarks with the 
towering cross of its cathedral." 

Dr. Maitland. The Dark Ages, p. 2. John Hodges, Pub. 
London, 1890. 

•^But the most philosophical mode of 
viewing its [monachism's] relation to 
Christianity is lo recognize that monachism 
has made a part of every creed which has 
attained a certain stage of ethical and 
theosophical development; that there is 
a class of minds for which it always has had 
a powerful attraction, and which can 
otherwise find no satisfaction; and con- 
sequently, that Christianity, if it is to make 
good its claim to be a universal religion, 
must provide expression for a principle 
which is as deeply seated in human nature 
as domesticity itself, albeit limited to a 
much smaller section of mankind." 

Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th E^iition) , XVI, 698. 



'•THE MONKS OF OLD.*' 



41 



* ^ ''Here, again, the influence of the 
Church was exerted with unwavering 
beneficence and success. The fathers 
employed all their eloquence in favor of 
labor; but it is to the monks, and especially 
to the Benedictine monks, that the change 
is preeminently due. At a time when 
religious enthusiasm was directed towards 
the monastic life as towards the ideal of 
perfection, they made labor an essential 
part of their discipline. Wherever they 
went, they revived the traditions of old 
Roman agriculture, and large tracts of 
France and Belgium were drained and 
planted by their hands. The monks of the 
order of St. Basil devoted themselves 
especially to painting, and all the mediaeval 
architects whose names have come down to 
us are said to have been ecclesiastics, till 
the rise of those great lay companies who 
designed or built the cathedrals of the 
twelfth century. A great number of the 
towns of Belgium trace their origin in this 
manner to the monks. ^ * « By these 



42 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



means the contempt for labor which had 
been produced by slavery was corrected, 
and the path was open for the rise of the 
industrial classes which followed the 
crusades." 

Lecky. Rationalism in Europe, Vol. 2, pp. 231-232. 

'*In Prance, the low countries and 
Germany they were preeminently agricul- 
turists. Gigantic forests were felled, 
inhospitable marshes were reclaimed, 
barren plains cultivated by their hands. 
The monastery often became the nucleus 
of a city. It was the center of civilization 
and industry, the symbol of moral power in 
an age of turbulence and war. 

Lecky, History of European Morals, Chapter 4. 



THE PAPAL POWER. 
I. HILDEBRAXD. 



THE Bishop of Rome was so much 
annoyed by Lombard free-booters, 
towards the middle of the eighth century 
that he called upon Pepin, the French king, 
to come over the Alps and establish peace. 
When Pepin subdued the Lombards he 
made the Pope sole ruler of Rome and the 
country near by. 

This was a great advantage to the spirit- 
ual head of the Christian Church. It 
relieved him from the influence and annoy- 
ance of petty kings and princes. But the 
Papal office was not hereditary. The petty 
kings had an opportunity of stepping in at 
the death of the Pope and exercising 
considerable influence in selecting his 
successor. For their busy interference they 
claimed the XDrivilege of appointing the 



44 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTOEY. 



bishops in their neighborhoods, and con- 
trolling the religious ^Datronage. If they 
hapiDened, as they frequently did. to be 
avaricious persons, there were scandalous 
sales of the best bishoprics and other 
repulsive proceedings. 

During the tenth century good men 
bitterly deplored the number of such abuses. 
Some of the Popes were appointed as the 
creatures of German emperors. Many 
important sees were filled by court favorites 
utterly unworthy for sacred offices. 

The Church soon made a stupendous 
effort to free itself from such worldly 
vassalage. It found a wise and adroit Moses 
in the monk, Hildebrand. His first step 
was to advise the Pope to designate a college 
of cardinals, which should thereafter have 
the naming of Roman x^ontiffs. Later on, 
Hildebrand was himself chosen Pope, and 
took the name of Gregory YII. 

A ceremony called the ''investiture'' of 
bishops, or the conferring upon them of the 
ring and crosier of their office by the 



THE PAPAL POWER. 



45 



emperor, had grown to mean more than a 
mere ceremony. The substance went with 
it; the actual selection of the bishop was 
implied in his investiture. Henry IV. of 
Germany had been particularly insistent in 
his exercise of this prerogative. The 
Church was disgraced by the 'bishops' thus 
thrust upon her. 

Gregory VII. cut the Gordian knot by 
abolishing the investiture and censuring 
any prince who kept it up. 

The manner in which the barbarian 
emperor met this papal act illustrates his 
conception of the civil ruler's power. He 
called a meeting of his bishops and deposed 
Gregory from the papal office, not forget- 
ting to set up one of his own court 
favorites in the former's place. 

Gregory VII. saw that he must fight the 
devil with fire. His counterblast came at 
once (A. D. 1076) in a proclamation absolv- 
ing the German people from allegiance to 
Henry. The ground taken was that the 
Emperor had broken his coronation oath. 



46 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



That oath required him to protect the 
Church and respect his people's liberties. 
It happened that just then Henry was 
failing in both particulars. The act of 
Gregory met with a wonderful response. 
Everywhere the monks and friars de- 
nounced Henry as no longer fit to rule. 
The lords gathered and repudiated 
him. He was a king without a throne, and 
it became the highest policy on his part 
to repent. 

This he did by a famous journey to 
Canossa. The Pope forgave him too easily, 
not discerning his purpose of revenge, for 
he subsequently drove Gregory from Home, 
and the aged pontiflf died in exile. But his 
spirit lived, and in the year 1122 the 
German emperor formally resigned the 
alleged right of ''investiture." 

Gregory deposed Henry in self-defense; 
some of Gregory's successors kept the war 
in Africa with the same object in view. A 
great contest with Frederick Barbarossa, 
Emperor of Germany, was ended in 1177. 



THE PAPAL POWEE. 



47 



The Papal authority won again. A few 
years afterwards King John of England 
asked the Pope to order the French king to 
give Normandy back to Britain, — implying 
that such an authority resided in the 
Roman See. Innocent III. did not do so, 
but he afterw^ards found occasion to declare 
John's throne forfeited, and to absolve the 
English from their allegiance. 



II. THE DEPOSING POWEE. 



For two centuries following Hildebrand's 
struggle with Henry IV. it seems to have 
been the generally-received opinion that the 
Pope might depose sovereigns where such 
valid reasons existed as oppression of the 
people, heresy and vice. The precise basis 
of this opinion is not clear. Some regard 
it as a development of feudalism, the Pope 
being recognized as the suzerain of all the 
sovereigns of Christendom. As a matter 
of fact, many rulers, at different times, 
placed their dominions under the direction 



48 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of the Pope, or invoked the pa^oal authority 
to recover their possessions. The deposing 
power may also have developed from a 
disposition to regard the Po^oe as the 
arbiter in disputes between Christian 
rulers. Still another view regards the 
deiDosing power as the received public law 
of the middle ages — from the fact that 
Kings and Em^oerors in order to reign 
lawfully had to profess the Catholic faith 
and be in communion with the Pope. 
Fenelon found a basis for the deposing 
power in the fact that the Pope was the 
final judge of all political contracts 
involving ''allegiance.'' He. as the chief 
pastor of the Church, was bound, in disputed 
cases, to instruct peojple consulting him as 
to whether they were obliged to keep their 
oaths of fealty. 

It seems clear that the deposing power of 
the Po^DC never was, and is not now, regarded 
as an article of Catholic faith. Pius the 
Xiuth, in a sermon, quoted by Cardinal 
Soglia said: ''No one now thinks any more 



THE PAPAL POWER. 



49 



of the right of deioosing princes, which the 
Holy See formerly exercised, and the 
supreme pontiff even less than any one."* 

It was a species of international law which 
the events of history, religious and 
political ujpheavals, have practically abro- 
gated. But while it was exercised, and 
during the ages when people recognized it, 
it undoubtedly served to xoromote liberty 
and to curb the cruelty and cupidity of 
sovereigns. 

In our age the i)eople do almost every 
year what the Popes did but rarely. The 
breed of kings has improved; there were 
numbers of mediaeval monarchs who ought 
to have been deposed, but who were let 
alone. The Papal anathemas struck men 
like Henry IV. and John Lackland, who 
richly deserved the scaffold. 



*Ferraris, Papa, quoted in Addis and Arnold's Catholic 
Dictionary. 



50 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



III. MORAL CHARACTER OF THE POPES. 

Of the two hundred and sixty Popes, 
seventy-nine have been canonized by the 
Catholic Chnrch as saints, preeminent 
for their holiness. 

Some of the remainder have been 
variously accused of immorality, political 
ambition and criminal intrigue. It is note- 
worthy that the characters of several thus 
accused have been vindicated by Protestant 
biographers. Voigt, in his Life of Gregory 
VII., Hurter's Innocent III., Eichhorn, 
Luden, Mueller, and Leopold Ranke, have 
cleared up much fiction and loartisan tradi- 
tion reflecting upon the moral character of 
a dozen Pontiffs. 

An instance of the absurdity of some of 
these fables is found in the story of Pope 
Joan. A learned woman, disguised as a 
man, succeeded, so the narrative runs, in 
deceiving the churchmen and securing her 
own selection to the Roman See, which she 
occupied for nearly three years. This 



THE PAPAL POWER. 



51 



story is traced back within two hundred 
years of the alleged date of the female 
Pope's pontificate. It is found wanting in 
a single element of authenticity, and no 
modern historian gives it any credence.* 

The tenth century furnishes us the most 
certain instances of immoral or bad Popes. 
Society was then in a transitional state. 
Rome was described as the "hostelry of 
nations." The "bad popes" are variously 
estimated by Catholic writers as from six 
to twenty. "We have forty-three virtuous, 
to one bad pope," says Cardinal Gibbons 
(Faith of our Fathers, Chap, xi.), "while 
there was a Judas Iscariot among the 
twelve Apostles." 

Writers like Leopold Kanke (History 
of the Popes) describe the Eoman Pontiffs 
of the first ages and of later times (since 
the rise of Protestantism) as irreproachable 
in their moral character. Voigt (Gregory 
VII., Vol. II., 98,) says: "The Holy See 

* See Baring Gould's " Myths of the Middle Ages." 



52 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



was the only tribunal that could set any 
limits to imperial despotism as a second 
defender of humanity.** Eoscoe (Life of 
Leo X., Vol. L, 53.) says: '^The Popes may 
in general be considered as superior to the 
age in which they lived."* 



" * ^ By the princes themselves was 
the head of the Church first called upon to 
decide weighty matters of state and to exert 
influence over the affairs of Europe. * * 
We cannot deny, on examining closely the 
wants of the situation and the spirit of those 
times, that it accomplished much good; that 
not seldom it protected the oppressed cause 
of justice. * ^ It seemed desirable and 
wholesome that even against the mightiest 
rulers one voice dared still to be raised 
alone for justice — a voice of which he 
should stand in awe; which he could not 
silence by mere force." 

A Course of Lectures on Modem History, by Frederick 
Schlegel. Bohn's Popular Library, London, 1S49. Lecture 
6-7, p. 88. 



THE PAPAL POWER 



53 



•'This doctrine, hostile as it might be to 
the independence of sovereigns, was often 
supported by the sovereigns themselves. 
Thus, when Richard I. was held in captivity 
by the emperor, his mother. Eleanor, rej^eat- 
edly solicited the Pontiff to procure his 
liberation by the exercise of that authority 
which he x^ossessed over all temporal prin- 
ces. Thus, King John Lack-land ( whose 
excesses afterwards x^rovoked against him- 
self the animadversion of the Church j 
invoked the aid of the same authority to 
recover Xormandy from the King of France. 
At first, indeed, the Popes contented them- 
selves with spiritual censures: but in an 
age when all notions of justice were 
modeled after the feudal jurisprudence, it 
was soon admitted that princes, by their 
disobedience, became traitors to God; that as 
traitors they ought to forfeit their kingdoms, 
the fees which they held of God; and that 
to i^ronounce such sentence, belonged to the 
Pontiff, vicegerent of Christ ui^on earth." 

Lingard's History of England, Vol. Ill, of the 3d London 
Edition, p. 35, note. 



54 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



•'Hence, the high authority which Eoroe 
then exercised over kings and emperors, 
was grounded, first, on a political claim 
growing out of the circumstances which 
accompanied the revival of the western 
empire; and secondly, on the general 
opinion of that time respecting the subor- 
dination of the temporal to the spiritual 
power/' 

Schlegel, Pliilos. 11. , p. 137. 

"When a pope or bishop proclaimed that 
a sovereign had lost his rights, that his 
subjects were released from their oath of 
fidelity, this interference, though undoubt- 
edly liable to the greatest abuse, was ofteu, 
in the particular case to which it was 
directed, just and salutary. It generally 
holds, indeed, that where liberty is wanting 
religion, in a great measure, supplies its 
IDlace. In the tenth century the oppressed 
nations were not in a state to protect 
themselves or to defend their rights against 



THE PAPAL POWEE. 



55 



civil violence — religion, in the name of 
Heaven, placed itself between them."' 

Guizot. History of Civilization, Vol. I, Lecture 5, p. 124, 
3d Am. Ed. (Hazlitt's Notes.) 

"The influence of the Papal authority, 
though sometimes abused, was then felt as a 
blessing to mankind; it rescued Europe 
from total barbarism; it afforded the only 
asylum and refuge from feudal oppression." 

Wheaton. History of the Laws of Nations, 33. 

"In those 'dark* ages we see no example of 
tyranny comparable to that of the Domi- 
tians at Rome. A Tiberius was impossible 
then; Rome would have crushed him. 
Great despotisms exist when kings believe 
that there is nothing above themselves. 
Then it is that the intoxication of unlimited 
power produces the most fearful crimes." 

Coquerel, Essai snr 1' Hist. Generale du Christianisime, 
page 75. 

"Hildebrand, sparing neither the bribed 
nor the bribers, incurred the inveterate 
odium of all the delinquents. Hildebrand 



56 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



had no respect to persons or judgment. Sin 
levelled Emperors and beggars before him." 

History of Normandy and England. Sir Francis Palgrave, 
Vol. I., p. 112. 

•'The mediaeval papacy, whatever evils may 
have been connected with it. saved Europe 
from anarchy and lawlessness." 

Fisher, History of the Reformation, Ch. II., p. 32. 

^'If the Papal power had not been adapted 
to the conditions of Europe, it could not 
have subsisted. It was the remedy for 
some of the greatest evils. We have to 
look to the Abyssinians and Oriental 
Christians, to see what Europe would have 
become without the Papacy. It was morally 
and intellectually the conservative power 
of Christendom, Politically, it was the 
Saviour of Europe. For, in all probability, 
the West, like the East, must have been 
overrun by Mohammedanism, and sank in 
irredeemable degradation if, in that great 
crisis of the world, the Church had not 
roused the nations to a united and x3rodigious 



THE PAPAL POWEE. 



57 



effort commensurate with the danger. In 
the frightful state of society which some- 
times lorevailecl. the Church everywhere 
presented a controlling and remedial 
influence." 

Southey. 

''The Pontifical monarchy taught the 
nations and kings to regard themselves 
mutually as compatriots, as being both 
equally subject to the divine sceptre of 
religion; and this centre of religious unity 
has been throughout many ages a real 
benefit to the human race." 

Robertson. 

•'In the midst of the conflicts of jurisdic- 
tions, the Pope alone proved to be the 
defender of the peoxDle. the only pacifier of 
great disturbances. The conduct of the 
Pontiffs inspired respect, as their beneficence 
merited gratitude." 

Sismondi. 

•'If all would become Catholics and believe 
in the infallibility of the Pope, there would 



58 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



not be required any other umpire than that 
of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. If the Popes 
resumed the authority which they had in 
the time of Nicholas the First, or Gregory 
the Seventh, it would be the means of 
obtaining perpetual peace and conducting 
us back to the golden age." 

Liebnitz. 



THE CRUSADES. 



RELIGrlOUS fervor and devotion were 
not the only causes of those onslanglits 
of united Europe against Mohammedan 
Asia — called the Crusades. The pretext 
was to protect the liberty and life of Chris- 
tian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem; there was 
a continuous breach of international rights 
in this respect upon which any spirited 
modern nation would take up the sword. 
But the deep, underlying motive was 
apprehension of Christian Europe for its 
own safety. 

''Mussulman impiety," said the con- 
temporaneous Pope Urban II., ''has 
overspread the fairest regions of Asia; 
Ephesus, Nice, and Antioch, have become 
Mohammedan cities; the barbarous hordes 
of the Turks have planted their colors on 
the very shores of the Hellespont, whence 



60 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



they threaten war to all oiir states of 
Christendom. Unless yon opjpose a mighty 
barrier to their triumphant course, how can 
Europe be saved from invasion, how can 
the storm be averted, which has so long 
threatened to burst upon our countries?*'* 

With Christian civilization it was a war 
of self-preservation. 

1. In this respect the Crusades were a 
notable success. Instead of waiting, as 
disunited states, to receive the blow of 
Mohammedan invasion, the nations of 
Europe ''took time by the forelock,'" welded 
themselves into unity, and made the aggres- 
sive move themselves. The Saracens and 
Seljukians were beaten to the ground. The 
issue for supremacy was inevitable between 
the religion born at Galilee and that born 
at Mecca. Rome saw farthest ahead. 

The first (A. D. 1090), fifth (A. D. 1201), 
and sixth (A. D. 1228) Crusades were the 
most important — at least in their results. 



*Michaud, History of the Crusades. Vol. I. 



THE CRUSADES. 



61 



In 1099 the first Crusaders captured 
Jerusalem and set up a Christian kin^'dom 
there which lasted eighty-eight years. In 
1205 a Latin empire was established in 
place of the Greek empire at Constantinople, 
and the eastern schism appeared to be at 
an end. But this union of the eastern and 
western churches lasted only until 1261, 
when the Latin empire was overthrown. 
Jerusalem again came into the possession 
of the Christians by treaty in 1229 (as a 
result of the sixth crusade) but in 1242 the 
hordes of Jenghiz Khan again swept away 
the Christian dominion; nor did the subse- 
quent Crusades ever get as far as the Holy 
City. The last, or ninth. Crusade went out 
A. D. 1270 under St. Louis, King of France. 
Nazareth was taken, but there the enterprise 
ended. 

2. From the east, the returning Crusa- 
ders brought back new inventions, new 
fabrics like the silk manufacture, alchemy, 
the Arabic notation, and all the impetus to 
science and letters that came from contact 



62 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTOEY. 



with Syria, Greece, and other strange lands. 
In the history of civilization this alone 
was sufficient to compensate for the blood 
and treasure expended in these movements. 

3. The Crusades were a blow at 
feudalism, cutting off the petty nobility 
and securing more orderly government. 
Traveling became easier. The enfranchised 
boroughs and the free cities sprang up 
by reason of the Crusades. 

4. The art of navigation was improved 
in the transport of armies. Nations built 
navies. The mariner's compass was brought 
into use. 

5. And from this circumstance came the 
growth of commerce and the upbuilding of 
Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Florence, those 
great mediaeval marts, whose trade with 
Asia and Africa was of world-wide note, 
and whose population of bankers and 
merchants laid the foundation of our 
modern commercial law as we read it. 

Thus a movement undertaken in what 
to materialists seems a spirit of fanaticism 



THE CRUSADES. 



63 



and superstition, justified itself even in 
their eyes by x^romoting Euroiie's material 
growth. 

^'The Crusades are not. in my mind, either 
the popular delusions that our cheap 
literature has determined them to 'be, nor 
Papal conspiracies against kings and 
peoples, as they apx^ear to the Protestant' 
controversialist. * * They were the first 
great eflPort of mediaeval life to go beyond 
the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambition; 
they were the trial feat of the young world 
essaying to use. to the glory of God and the 
benefit of man. the arms of its new knight- 
hood. ^ That in the end they were a 
benefit to the world no one that reads can 
doubt; and that in their course they brought 
out a love for all that is heroic in human 
nature — the love of freedom, the honor of 
prowess, sympathy with sorrow, perseverance 
to the last, and patient endurance without 
hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly 
prove; proving moreover that it was by the 



6i MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



experience of those times that the former of 
these virtues were realized and presented to 
posterity." 

Lectures on Mediaeval and Modem History; p. 157. By 
Wm. Stnbbs, D. D. Bishop of Chester, Regius Prof, of 
Modern History of Cambridge and Edinburgh. Oxford, at 
the Clarendon Press, 1SS5. 

^'The princix3al effect, then, of the Crusades 
was a great step towards the emancipation 
of the mind, a great progress towards 
enlarged and liberal ideas. * * Such, in 
my opinion, are tire real results of the 
Crusades — on the one hand extension of 
ideas and the emancipation of thought, 
on the other a general enlargement of the 
social sphere and the opening of a wider 
field for every sort of activity: they 
produced at the sam.e time more individual 
freedom and more political unity." 

Guizot's History of Civilization, Vol. I. Lect. 8. 

^'The effect of the Crusades was, neverthe- 
less, a complete revolution in the manners 
and customs of the western nations: the 
suppression of servitude, the founding of 



THE CRUSADES. 



65 



the free towns, the alienation and the 
division of the feudal laws and the 
develoioment of the commercial system.** 

Military and Religious Life in the Middle Ages, by Paul 
La Croix, Curator of the Imperial Library of the Arsenal, 
Paris, (London, Chapman and Hall. 1S74.) p. 134. 

^•The}" [the Crusades] failed, indeed, to 
establish the xoermanent dominion of Latin 
Christendom, whether in New Rome or 
Jerusalem, but they prolonged, for nearly 
four centuries, the life of the Eastern 
Empire, and by so doing they arrested the 
tide of Mohammedan conquests as effectu- 
ally as it was arrested for Western Europe 
by Charles Martel on the plains of Tours.'* 

Encyclopeedia Britannica. (Ninth Ed. Article ••Crusades" 
yi., 6-29.) 

•'The Crusades undoubtedly x3roduced a 
powerful economic effect by transferring, in 
many cases, the i^ossessions of the feudal 
chiefs to the industrious classes, whilst, by 
bringing different nations and races into 
contact, by enlarging the horizon and 
the conceiDtion of the populations, as by 



66 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



affording special stimulus to navigation, 
they tended to give a new activity to 
international trade.'' 

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ninth Ed., XIX, p. 352. 



PREMATURE PROTESTANTISMS. 



IT is worthy of remark that six of the 
earlier heresies in the history of the 
Church should have arisen respecting the 
divine persons of the Godhead. The Arians 
(325) taught that Christ was inferior to the 
other persons of the Trinity. The Mace- 
donians (381) taught that the Holy Ghost 
was inferior. The Nestorians (431) taught 
that there were two persons (not two natures) 
in Christ. The Eutychians (451) taught 
that there was but one nahire — the divine. 
The Monothelites (680) held that Christ 
had no human will. The Manichseans (280 
— 1215) taught that Christ did not assume 
a real human body, but merely appeared in 
one like the angels of the Old Testament. 

The Pelagian heresy denied the doctrine 
of original sin. The Iconaclasts opposed 
sacred images. And the heresy of Beren- 



68 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



garins (10^8) denied the real presence of 
Christ in the Eucharist. 

During the latter middle ages the most 
famous heresies were those of the Albigenses 
and Waldenses, condemned b'y the council 
of Lateral! in 1179: and the teachings of 
Wycliffe and his disciple, Huss, condemned 
by the council of Constance in 1414. 

These may be styled premature Protest- 
antisms^ from the fact that they expressed 
the religious unrest of their time. The 
Calvinists were proud to trace their 
ancestry to the Waldenses; and Wycliffe is 
sometimes styled the prototype of English 
Protestantism. 

The Albigenses were so styled after 
Albi, a town in southern France, where the 
sect became numerous about 1200. Pope 
Innocent III. sent Peter, of Chateau-neuf, 
and three other monks to convert them; but 
they murdered Peter and terrified his 
followers. Count Raymond of Toulouse 
sided with them, and they carried things 



PREMATUEE PROTESTANTISMS. 69 



with a high hand. The murder of the 
Pope's legate was the occasion of a crusade 
against Toulouse and Albi, led by Simon of 
Montfort, at the head of a French army. 
The war lasted from 1209 to 1227, and 
finally drifted from a religious to a political 
contest. The Albigenses were utterly 
crushed. 

Respecting the nature of the Albigensian 
teachings, contemporary writers agree in 
connecting them with the Manichaeans. 

This, too, is Bossuet's opinion. Haliam 
and Mosheim substantially coincide with 
him. Identification with Manichseism is 
regarded as a damning indictment against 
the Albigenses. The judicial records of the 
middle ages are full of the blackest crimes 
attributed to this sinuous and surreptitious 
sect. 

Mani, a Persian teacher of the third 
century, compounded Paganism and Chris- 
tianity into a system of doctrines, which 
persisted through the centuries in various 
forms and under various names. One 



70 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



author counts over seventy Manichsean 
sects. 

The iDopular and legal dislike towards the 
Manichseans was due, not so much to 
their theological vagaries, as to their re- 
puted immoralities. They were described 
as Mediaeval Mormons. They inculcated 
devil-worship, denied the divinity of 
Christ, rejected the Old Testament, and 
repudiated the observance of Sunday. 

Their midnight orgies, their hatred of 
marriage, their incests, fornications and 
suicides were the scandals of the middle 
ages. They united secrecy and hypocrisy 
as methods of covering their tracks. 

In France, they were called, from their 
origin, Bulgarians; in some parts of Italy, 
Publicans, a corruption of the word Pauli- 
cians; in the provinces, where they were 
most numerous. Provincials, or, after 1208, 
Albigenses, from the town of Albi in 
Languedoc; in the Milanese Territory, 
Cathari, i. e., the Pure, or Paterenes and 
Paterinians, a name which they had usurped 



PREMATURE PROTESTANTISMS. 71 



from the anti-simoniacal Catholic church 
party in Milan; in Belgium, Piphiler or 
Weavers, from the trade which the greater 
number of them followed, and sundry 
other names; but the generic term, 
Manichseans, was given to them universally, 
and was accepted by themselves in their 
disputations with Catholics. 

The Albigenses held many of their 
doctrines, and rivaled them in many points 
of violence and debauchery. "I have seen 
on all sides," says Stephen, Abbot of St. 
Genevieve, describing to the King of 
France the condition of Albigensian 
Toulouse, "churches burned and ruined to 
their foundations; I have seen the dwellings 
of men changed into the dens of wild 
beasts." 

The Waldenses, who were also termed 
Vaudois and Poor Men of Lyons, were 
followers of Peter Waldo, a merchant of 
Lyons. In 1160 Waldo, affected by the 
death of a fellow merchant, gave his prop- 
erty to the poor, and led a life of poverty. 



72 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



Ill teaching that malefactors ought not to 
be condemned, but should be allowed to go 
at large. — after the manner of the tares 
described in the parable, — the Waldenses 
came into conj&ict with the civil x3ower. 
They denounced oaths as sinful, and 
advocated Communism. The Mass and 
Purgatory were eliminated from their 
religion. They thought the clergy ought 
to hold no property. Ultimately some of 
them drifted into the immoral and 
pagan customs of the Albigenses. The 
fact that they existed about the time and in 
the neighborhood of the Albigenses. has 
led to their being confused with these more 
unworthy sectaries. 

The heresies of Wycliffe (1824-84) and 
John Huss (1375-1414) bore fruits in the 
Lollards of England and the Bohemian 
Brethren of Prague. Henry T. put down 
the former on the charge of conspiracy, and 
the Bohemian Brethren, after a bloody civil 
war, expired of inanition. 



PEEMATUEE PEOTESTANTISMS. 73 



Wycliffe continued a priest of the Cath- 
olic Church to the time of his death. His 
divergence from Catholic teaching had 
reference to the supremacy of the Pope in 
spiritual matters, which he partly contro- 
verted, and to certain regulations respecting 
the authority of Bishops over priests. He 
seems to have recanted his views prior to 
his death. 

Huss followed WyclifPe in most points, 
but was more violent in his methods. He 
attended the Council of Constance under a 
safe conduct from the Emperor Sigismund. 
The Council condemned his teachings as 
heretical, and heresy being at that time a 
violation of the civil as well as of the 
ecclesiastical law, the secular arm took hold 
of Huss after the Council had got through 
with him. He was burned at the stake 
July, 1414. 

''The tenets ascribed to them [the Albi- 
genses] by all contemporary authorities 
coincide so remarkably with those held 



74 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



by the Paulicians, and in earlier times by 
the Manichseans, that I do not see how we 
can reasonably deny what is confirmed by 
separate and uncontradicted testimonies, 
and contains no intrinsic want of 
probability." 

Hallam's Yiew of the Middle Ages, Ch. IX. part II. (p. 
359, Yol. III. New York, W. J. Widdleton, Pub., 1S77.) 

^'The descent of the Albigenses may be 
traced with tolerable distinctness from the 
Panliciane, a sect that sprang into 
existence in the Eastern Church during the 
sixth century. The Paulicians were agnos- 
tics and were accused by their enemies 
and persecutors of holding Manichsean 
doctrines which, it is said, they Yehemently 
disowned. Their creed, whatcYer it ^may 
haYC been precisely, spread gradually west- 
ward through Europe. In the ninth 
century it found many adherents in 
Bulgaria, and three hundred years later 
it was maintained and defended, though not 
without imijortant modifications, by the 



PEEIMATURE PROTESTANTISMS. 



75 



Albigenses in the south of France. * 
They [tlie Albigenses] inherited and used, 
as has already been said, certain doctrines 
of eastern origin, such as the Manichgean 
dualism, diocetism in relation to the persons 
of Christ, and a theory of metempsychosis. 
They seem, like the Manichseans, to have 
disowned the authority of the old Testa- 
ment; and the division of their adherents 
into the perfecti and crederites is similar 
to the Manichsean distinction between electi 
and auditori,''^ 

Encyclopedia Britannica, Yol. I., 454. 

"Western Manichseism, however, though it 
adhered only to the broader principles of 
Orientalism, the two co-equal conflicting- 
principles of good and evil, the eternity of 
matter, and its implacable hostility to spirit, 
aversion to the Old Testament as the work 
of the wicked Demiurge, the unreality of 
the suffering Christ, was, or became, more 
Manichsean than its Grecian parent, Paulic- 
ianism. * * Western Manichseism is 



76 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



but dimly to be detected in the eleventh 
century. * * But in the twelfth century 
Manichseism is rampant, bold, undisguised. 
Everywhere are Puritans, Paterines, 
Populars, suspected, or convicted, or con- 
fessed Manichseans. * * * 

The chief seat of these opinions was in 
the south of France. * * Their religion 
was chivalry, but chivalry becoming less 
and less religious; the mistress had become 
the saint, the casuistry of the Court of 
Love superseded that of the confessional. 
There had grown up a gay license of 
manners not adverse only to the austerity 
of monkish Christianity but to pure 
Christian morals." 

mstory of Latin Christianity, (Vol. V., Oh. viii, p. 159-63.) 
By Henry Hart Milman. New York. Sheldon & Co., 1861. 

"In a short time the Albigenses had 
congregations with schools and charitable 
institutions of their own. Then they drove 
away the Roman Catholic priests from the 
churches, took possession of the buildings. 



PKEMATUEE PEOTESTANTISMS. 



77 



and elected their oayil priests and bishops. 
* * This state of things caused, of course, 
great alarm at Rome." 

The Schaff - Herzog Dictionary. Vol. I. Article on 
Albigenses. 



BIBLES BEFORE LUTHER. 



IT is ascertained that at least twenty-two 
versions, or different translations, of the 
Bible existed in the various tongues of 
Europe before the time of Luther. Over 
seventy editions of the entire Bible in 
vernacular tongues were printed during the 
seventy years intervening from 1460 to 
1530. The Bible was printed twenty times 
in the German language before Luther's 
translation appeared (1530). 

Two copies of a German Bible, printed in 
1466, are preserved in the Senatorial library 
at Leipsic. The Mazarin Bible is considered 
the earliest complete book published. It 
was printed in Latin about 1455."* 

A German edition of the Bible, published 
in 1460, is the earliest book printed with 
metal type and on both sides of the leaf. 



*Hallam's Lit. of Europe, I., 96. 



BIBLES BEFOEE LUTHER. 



79 



Key. Dr. Maitland, a learned divine of 
the Church of England, estimates that fifty 
Latin editions of the Bible were published 
before Luther was born. "To say nothing 
of parts of the Bible or of books whose 
place is uncertain, we know of a least 
twenty editions of the whole Latin Bible 
printed in Germany alone before Luther was 
born."* 

Sickendorf, a biographer and disciple of 
Luther, mentions three German editions of 
the Bible, published at Wittenberg in 1470, 
1483 and 1490.t 

Menzel, in his history of Germany, says: 
"Before the time of Luther the Bible had 
already been translated and printed in both 
High and Low Dutch. "J 

Throughout the middle ages the Bible 
was the great popular book of Europe. 
Dr. Maitland says that the very literature 



*Dr. Maitland, "The Dark Ages," p. 469. 
tCommentaries on Luther, Libr. 1. Sec. 51. 
?Menzel, Vol. II., p. 223. 



80 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of the time is written in the words and 
phrases of Scripture. 

Fragments of Bishop Uphilas' Scriptural 
translation, written in the fourth century, 
are our oldest specimens of the Gothic 
tongue. The Venerable Bede and King 
Alfred both contributed Anglo-Saxon 
translations of parts of the Bible. In the 
fourteenth century John de Trevisa made a 
full English translation. 

The Protestant biblical scholar, Bishop 
Usher, states that the first French transla- 
tion of the Bible was made in 1478. It was 
successively republished sixteen times 
before 1546. A Flemish translation by 
Merland, in 1210, is also mentioned by 
Usher. Seven editions of this version 
were printed before Luther's translation 
appeared. 

The complete Bible in Spanish was 
edited by Boniface Ferrer, in 1405. The 
Spaniards are to be credited, too, with the 
first polyglot edition of the Sacred 
Scriptures. This edition was printed in 



BIBLES BEFORE LUTHER. 



81 



six different languages at Madrid, in 1515, 
under the aus^Dices of Cardinal Ximenes. 
Italian translations of tlie Bible were 
common throughout the middle ages and 
numerous editions were printed at Venice, 
Florence, Naples, and Rome prior to 
Luther's time. A Bohemian Bible was 
published at Prague in 1488. There are 
Danish authorities who state that the 
Icelanders had an entire translation of the 
Scriptures in the thirteenth century. 

Dr. Maitland says: ^'To say nothing of 
parts of the Bible, or of books whose place 
is uncertain, we know of at least twenty 
different editions of the whole Latin Bible 
printed in Germany only, before Luther 
was born." * * Before Luther was born 
the Bible had been printed in Home, 
Naples', Florence, and Placenza, and Venice 
alone had furnished eleven editions." 

Dr. Maitland, "The Dark Age," p. 469. 

Eeuss says: ^'No book was so fre- 
quently published, immediately after the 



82 



MOOTED QrESTIOXS OF HLSTOEY. 



first invention of printine. as the Latin 
Bible, more than :o:t hnn.:necl editions of it 
being struck on: before the year 1520." 

Hallam. says: "In the eighth and ninth 
centuries, when the vnl^ate had ceased to 
be generally intelligible, there is no reason to 
snspect any intention in the Church to 
deprive the laity of the Scriptures. Transla- 
tions were freely made into the vernacular 
languages, and. perhaps, read in churches. 
^ ^ ^ Louis the Debonair is said to have 
caused a G-erman version of the Xew Testa- 
ment to be made. Otfrid. in the same 
century, rendered the ^csprls. or.- rather, 
abridged them, into Gtrman verse. This 
work is still trxtant." 

Hai:--. i- his ••Mi^.ne Ages."' Chap. IX.. Parr II. 

"The first German printed Bible, bearing 
the arms of Frederick IIL. issued from the 
Maiuz press in 1462, In 1462, Faust 
published a Bible commonly called the 
Mentz Bible." 

E -.hr.rr.'s I::.-r : h :o Literature. Part I.. Lecture 3. 



A2_::_-_ '"t--:.-! ?._:::t>:t:. :li 1^66, two 
copies of which a i r - _ ^ : ^ - : t i** ttte 
Senatorial Kbrar L : sic. Other 

Tersions were pnl _ ~ t 

Son- K-i-::-::i, ?. "L-: E:";:.^ -L. 

Cax::n Ezl:;::::.^;' Er 

-i^'ir — beTery Bsef:.^ ::: ;::_-r n:_:::__ ?: 

proving the :^":_t ^ : : 

L : L r s^wdi?! : :1t E t : : : t first time 
•r,: Erf-::rt about l-:-'T N:: are there 

e :iL= :f *:_.e L?.::i. ' v..^f.:e long: 



year of L-:.":Lr:"^ ':::n:, ^t?-: :l:T-r 

more before tke end cz :ri.:'iry." 

had the assu: :i t :: zitI^ : Ei^ „^ 
H - : n e 5S, praying: that he wonld hel r 

too, 2s G.^- - " • E - r : . -r , r i;. ... r - f-Ocnza j and 



Si MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



Venice alone had furnished eleven editions. 
No doubt, we should be within the truth if 
w^e were to say that beside the multitude of 
manuscript copies, not yet fallen into disuse, 
the press had issued fifty different editions 
of the whole Latin Bible; to say nothing of 
Psalters, New Testaments, or other parts. 
And yet, more than twenty years after, we 
find a young man who had received ^^a very 
liberal education," who ''had made great 
proficiency in his studies at Madgeburg, 
Eisenbach, and Erfurt," and who, neverthe- 
less, did not know what a Bible was, simply 
because "the Bible was unknown in those 
days." [This refers to the absurd story — 
as told by D'Aubigne, — of Luther "discov- 
ering" a Bible for the first time, when he 
was twenty years old.] 

Dr. Maitland, "The Dark Ages," p. 506. 

"To come, however, to the question — did 
people in the Dark Ages know anything 
of the Bible? Certainl^^, it was not as 
commonly known and as generally in the 



BIBLES BEFORE LUTHER. 



85 



hands of men as it is now, and has been 
almost ever since the invention of priniing 
— the readar must not suspect me of 
wishing to maintain any such absurd 
opinion; but I do think that there is 
sufficient evidence — (1.) that during that 
period the Scriptures were more accessible 
to those who could use them — (2.) were, 
in fact, more used — and (3.) by a greater 
number of persons — than some n:iodern 
writers would lead us to suppose." 

Dr. Maitland, "The Dark Ages," p. 220. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 



THERE was a gradual recovery from 
barbarism and disorder all through - 
out the middle ages; but the epoch usually 
referred to as that of the '''BeYiyal of 
Learning/' comes towards the close of 
medieeval history. What had been going 
on at a slow pace during the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries then broke into a 
canter and a gallo^D; and the rapidity with 
which new things came into use — 
inventions crowding in upon each other, 
commerce broadening into discover}', and 
the material comforts of the peo^jle vastly 
improving — tended to make the loeople feel 
a new strength, and take a more cheerful 
view of life. 

Although ''the horologue of Time does not 
peal out the x^assage from one era to 
another,"* the epoch of the Revival may be 



THE EEYIVAL OF LEAENING. 



87 



said to date from the invention of printing 
in 1440. It culminated about the end of 
the century, in what was termed "the Golden 
Age-* of Pope Leo X. Leo was one of the 
Medici, a Florentine family, justly famed 
for its patronage of the arts. 

"Then sculpture and her sister arts revived, 
Stones leaped to form and rocks began to live. 
With sweeter notes each rising temple rang, 
A Raphael painted and a Vida sang.'' 

The manifestations of the epoch were in 
its literature, its discoveries, and its political 
and material advances. 

The nations began to develo^o their 
vernaculars. Poetry and history were 
written in other tongues besides the 
scholastic Latin. England had her Chaucer 
and Italy her Petrarch. Vigorous German, 
elegant French, and sonorous Sjpanish were 
rounded and polished into literature. 

The rise of free cities, the develoioment 
of commerce, the Hanseatic league, and the 



88 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



spread of the Italian banking system 
became avenues of great activity. 

Marco Polo, the famous Venetian naviga- 
tor, had daring competitors in Bartholomew 
Dias and Vasco da Gama. They rounded 
the Caxoe of Good Hope and planted 
European outposts in the Indies. Finally 
Columbus comes with his discovery of a 
new world, — 1492 — year of the greatest 
event in the Christian era. 

The cannon booming at the siege of 
Constantinople, in 145B, was a clear and 
emphatic announcement to the world that 
the age of gunpowder was at hand. 

1. The fall of that city, then the capital 
of Greek culture, sent scores of learned 
refugees into Italy, Germany and France, 
where they were received with open arms 
and installed as teachers in the universites. 

2. This, and the invention of printing 
— an almost contemporaneous occurrence — 
are considered the two great causes of the 
revival of learning. 

The Greeks roused a new interest in 



THE EEYIYAL OF LEAEXIXG. 



89 



classical study, simultaneously with a new 
interest in scientific study, caused by the 
Arabs and Moors. The literature of every 
country felt the impulse of this awakened 
converse. It was a ^*new birth" to letters, 
and the epoch has been fitly so-called: — the 
^•Renaissance.'* 

As for printing, it is easy to imagine its 
vast importance. It went into immediate 
and universal use. The Bible was in type 
A. D., 1455. Pamphlets, political screeds, 
satires, lampoons, caricatures, and popular 
songs were sent into circulation by the 
thousands. Letters were brought down to 
the masses. 

We may properly add as other and more 
remote causes of the revival: 

B. The Crusades, which, the more they 
are studied, the more drastic does their in- 
fluence on European civilization appear. 

4. The great universities, founded in 
the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, under the fostering care of the 
Church, now efflorescing under the ray of 



90 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF niSTOEY. 



reflected light let in from the East, stored 
with the intellectual energies of the 
preceding ages and conserving the libraries 
of Europe. 

The larger number of the great univer- 
sities of modern Euroj)e were established in 
the middle ages. Those of Paris, Oxford, 
Bologna, and Ferrara were in existence for 
a century or more xorior to A. D. 1000. As to 
the age of the others, the following are the 
most generally accepted dates: Salamanca, 
1200; Cambridge, 1280; Prague, 1358; Vien- 
na, 1365; Ingolstadt, 1372; Leipsic, 1108; 
Louvain, 1425; Basle, 1469; Alcala, 1517. 

Considering the population and condition 
of Europe at the time, fifteen universities 
was a generous allowance; and it hardly 
accords with the popular notion of the cul- 
ture of those days that so great provision 
was required for higher education. This is 
especially true when we are informed that 
Oxford had a larger eurollment during the 
middle ages than it has had at any time 
since — some three thousand halls being 



THE KEVIYAL OF LEARNING. 



91 



required for the convenience of students, 
and the attendance varying from 5,000 to 
25,000. The eloquence of Abelard is said 
to have drawn nearly 30,000 students to 
the university of Paris, and they came from 
all parts of Europe. The re-conquest from 
barbarism must have been in an advanced 
stage when the mind of Europe created 
such emporiums of learning. 

"This literary and artistic movement 
extended from the fourteenth, to the middle 
of the sixteenth century. It is variously 
styled the Revival of Letters, the age of 
Humanism, by the French term Eenais- 
sance, and the Italian Rinascimento . In the 
widest sense the Renaissance comprehends 
the revival of literature and art, the progress 
of philosophy and criticism, the discovery of 
the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, 
the extinction of feudalism, the development 
of the great nationalities and languages of 
modern Europe, the emancipation of 
enslaved intelligence, the expansion and 
freedom of thought, the invention of the 



92 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



printing press, the discovery and explora- 
tion of America and the East; in one word^ 
all the progressive developments of the later 
middle ages. * ^ * 

''The Renaissance was born in the 
Republic of Florence, under the patronage 
of the Medici family, and matured in Rome 
under the patronage of the Pope. From 
these two centers it spread all over Italy, 
France, Germany, Holland, and England. 
It ascended the papal throne with Nicholas 
V. (1447-55), the founder of the Vatican 
Library, and was nurtured by his successor, 
Pius II. (1458-64), Sixtus IV. (1471-84), 
who founded the Sistine Chapel, Julius II. 
(1513-13), who called Bramonte, Michael 
Angelo and Raphael to Rome, and Leo X. 
(1503-22), who gave them the most liberal 
encouragement in their works of art. The 
Renaissance was the last great movement 
of history in which Italy and the Popes took 
the lead.*' 

The Renaissance (Ch. II., pp. 9-10). By Philip Schaif, D. 
D., Prof, of Church History in Union Theological Seminary, 
N. Y. G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1891. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 



93 



"The Renaissance must, indeed, be viewed 
mainly as an internal process whereby 
spiritual energies latent in the middle 
ages were developed into actuality and 
formed a mental habit for the modern world. 
The process began in Italy and gradually 
extended to the utmost bounds of Europe^ 
producing similar results in every nation 
and establishing a common form of 
civilization." 

Encyclopsedia Britannica, Ninth Ed. VoL 20, p.238. 

*'At Oxford, under Henry III., it is said 
there were 30,000 scholars, — an exaggeration 
which seems to imply that the real number 
was very great. A respectable writer asserts 
that there were fully 10,000 at Bologna 
about the same time. * * At the death 
of Charles VII. in 1453 it [the University 
of Paris] is said to have contained 25,000 
students." 

HaUam's View of the Middle Ages. Ch. IX. Part II. (New 
York. W. J. Widdleton, Publisher.) Vol. III., p. 399. 

"The partial and short sighted view which 



94 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



condemned the whole Renaissance move- 
ment as dangerous to faith and morals, 
cannot be considered as thajt of the Church. 
At this time, as throughout the whole of 
the middle ages, she showed herself to be 
the patroness of all wholesome, intellectual 
progress, the protectress of all true culture 
and civilization." 

History of the Popes (since the close of the Middle Ages.) 
By Dr. Lndwig Pastor, Prof, of History in the University of 
Innsbruck. Vol. I., p. 54. London, John Hodges, Pub. 1891. 



INDULGENCES. 



THE word '•indulgence,'^ according to 
Webster, is derived from the Latin 
Terb indidgere^ ''to be kind or tender to 
one." He defines an indulgence to be: 
Remission of tlie temporal punishment 
due to sins, granted by the Poi^e or Church, 
and supposed to save the sinner from 
purgatory; absolution from the censures 
and public penances of the Church." 

This, though slightly inaccurate, does 
not differ greatly from the definition 
given by Catholics themselves in their 
catechisms and by their recognized au- 
thorities, both before and after the time 
of the Protestant Reformation. As a 
definition, however, it may not x^rove so 
clear and comprehensive as the average 
reader would desire. Indulgences have 
played a part in history, and it is Cjuite 



96 3I00TED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



important to obtain a right grasp of their 
nature and object. 

AYe clear the ground for this right under- 
standing by stating what indulgences are 
not. They are not licenses to commit 
sin: neither are they pardons for sins 
already committed. Having disposed of 
these misapprehensions, we niay take up 
Webster's definition and examine its terms. 

An indulgence is a remission granted 
by the Po^De or Church •'of the temporal 
punishments due to sin." — a discharge or 
pardon from some kind of ijunishment 
which would otherwise have to be endured. 

But what is meant by " temporal punish- 
ment due to sin"? In the Bible (3 Kings 
xii. 13-14); the Prophet Xathan says to 
David: "The Lord also has taken away 
thy sin; nevertheless, because thou hast 
given occasion to the enemies of the Lord 
to blaspheme, for this thing the child that 
is born of thee shall surely die." Though 
the eternal guilt of David's sin was 
forgiven, the temporal punishment was 



IXDULGEXCES. 



97 



still to be expiated. The church imposed 
penances upon its repentant children 
as a commutation of the temporal 
punishment dcue sin. Among the early 
Christians, severe penances were imposed 
on those of the faithful who confessed to 
grievous sins. Violation of the Sabbath 
day. by any servile work, for instance, was 
punished by three days on bread andc water. 
Perjury was punishable by the sinner being- 
obliged to sell all his goods and give the 
proceeds to the i^oor. In the course of 
time, it became a more general practice to 
remit these severe ijenances upon the 
penitent comx^lying with certain conditions, 
such as x^^^^-yt-r and almsgiving: and. this 
mitigation or remission was regarded an 
indulgence on the part of the Church. 

It never was the teaching of the Church, 
nor the belief of the Christians in any age. 
that an indulgence was a forgiveness of 
sin, much less a license to commit sin. 

Luther, when he attacked the alleged 
traffic in indulgences, did not Cjuestion the 



98 



3I0CTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



right of the Church to grant them, nor did 
he say that they were not of great spiritual 
value. ^ It was somewhat later in his 
career that he came out against the whole 
theory of indulgences; it was not until he 
struck at other Catholic teachings, such as 
Papal Supremacy, priestly celibacy, and 
the necessity of good works for salvation. 

Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, together 
with confession and repentance, were the 
conditions x^rescribed in the famous bull 
of Leo X.. proclaiming an indulgence. 
Even D'Aubigne says: •'In the Pope's 
bull something was said of repentance of 
the heart and confession of the lips."T 



* He did not as yet impugn the doctrine of indulgences 
itself, and he expressed his conviction that their good 
father, the Pope, must be altogether unavrare of the extent 
to which such abuses [sale of indulgences] v,-ere allovred 
to prevail. ■■ — Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. xx., p. 326. 

tVol. i., p. 214. 



INDULGEXCES. 



99 



Pope Leo X. desired to use the alms 
thus contributed in completing St. Peter's 
Cathedral at Rome, than ^hich 

"What could be 
Of earthlj' structures in His honor piled 
Of sublimer aspects Majesty, 
Power, glory, strength and beauty, all are aisled 
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled." 

John Tetzel. a Dominican friar, was 
commissioned by the Archbishop of Mentz 
and Magdeburg to preach the indulgence 
in Germany. Luther, an Augustinian 
friar, was moved to denounce Tetzel's 
methods and to point out his mistakes. 
At first the conflict seemed to be merely 
a "monkish quarrel."' 

As to what Tetzel's mistakes were, there 
is a mass of controversy. It was charged 
that his way of presenting the advantages 
of indulgeiices to the people x^artook of the 
nature of a sale. Still, D'Aubigne, an ultra 
Protestant historian, tells us that ''the hand 
that delivered the indulgence could not 
receive the money, — that was forbidden 



100 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



under the severest penalties." Confession 
and repentance were always made pre- 
requisites. 

But the very payment of money as a part 
of a religious duty, whether for alms or for 
practical good works, could quite easily 
take on the appearance of a purchase. 
Especially would this be the case if the 
other and more essential requirements, 
such as true sorrow, humble confession and 
full reparation, were slurred over and the 
most stress laid upon almsgiving. 

An eminent Catholic authority (Cardinal 
Gibbons in his "Faith of our Fathers," 
page 393), says: "Tetzel's conduct was 
disavowed and condemned by the repre- 
sentative of the Holy See. The Council 
of Trent, which was held some time 
afterwards, took effectual measures to put 
a stop to all irregularities regarding 
Indulgences, and issued the following 
decree: "Wishing to correct and amend 
the abuses which have crept into them, 
and on occasion of which, this signal 



INDULGENCES. 



101 



name of Indulgences is blasphemed by 
heretics, the holy Synod enjoins in general, 
by the present decree, that all wicked 
traffic for obtaining them, which has been 
the fruitful source of many abuses among 
the Christian people, should be wholly 
abolished."* 

The following definitions of indulgences 
are taken from popular books of instruction 
ihat were current in Germany at the end of 
the fifteenth, and the beginning of the 
sixteenth century: 

The Seelenfuehrer says: ^'Know ye, that 
indulgence does not forgive your sins, but 
only remits the punishment which you 
have deserved. Know ye, that you can 
obtain no indulgence when you are in sin, 
and have not confessed and truly repented, 
and really determined to improve your life; 
for otherwise all is to no purpose." 

The Summa Johannis, of the year 1480, 
declares that '"only he who sincerely repents 



* Sess. XXV., Dec. de Indtdgentiis. 



102 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of his sins can gain the indulgence ... if 
the man be in a state of mortal sin he can 
not gain the indulgence, for it is not given 
to sinners.'' 

''To those who said that indulgence was 
forgiveness of sins for money, and therefore 
that it could be bought," the explanation 
of the Articles of the Creed (A. D. 1486), 
remarks: "That it was a question of the 
praise and honor of God, and not of the 
collection of money." 

Again, ''the indulgence is not given to 
those who simply contribute to the building 
of churches, unless they are in a state of 
grace, and give out of piety, in true faith, 
with great confidence in the communion of 
Saints, and their merits, in whose honor 
and praise the churches are built, and with 
special confidence in the mercy and help 
of God." 

Janssen, History of the German People, Vol. I, pp. 41-2. 

For a full and scholarly review of the 
documentary aspects of the indulgence of 



INDULGENCES. 



103 



1517 the reader is referred to Janssen's 
''History of the German People," and 
es^jecially to the fourteenth letter in his 
"Aji Mein Kritiker^^ (To my Critics) 
(Freiburg, 1882.) The bull proclaiming 
the indulgence and the instructions to the 
preachers of the indulgence throughout 
Germany are quoted to show that confes- 
sion, sincere repentance, and fasting were 
conditions to be insisted upon with much 
emphasis from all who sought the indul- 
gence. Even Tetzel, in his anti-theses, 
directed against Luther's theses, is quoted 
as explaining that no indulgence can be 
gained except by sincere repentance and 
confession. No alms were to be demanded; 
contributions were to be voluntary. "That 
in spite of the strict regulations of the 
instructions to the preachers of the indul- 
gence, grievous abuses occurred, I have," 
says Janssen, ''set forth in my history (vol. 
ii, p. 77)." All the documents of the case 
have been gathered by Kapp, a Lutheran 



104 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



authority (Leipsic, 1721), and Janssen's 
citations are to Kapp's collection. 

The Council of Trent asserts that the 
power of conferring indulgences was given 
by Christ to the Church; that she has 
always used this power; that the use of 
indulgences, as being the most salutary, is 
to be retained in the Church; that those 
are condemned by the Council who say 
that the Church has no power of granting 
them. In granting them, moderation is to 
be observed, lest Church discipline be 
enervated. Abuses are to be reformed. 
All evil gains are to be abolished. Other 
abuses, that cannot be specially prohibited, 
are to be reported in the Provincial Synod 
by the Bishop, reviewed by the other 
Bishops in the Synod, and referred to the 
Pope, '4hat thus the gift of the holy 
indulgences may be dispensed to all the 
faithful, piously, holily, and incorruptibly." 

Session xxv, Ch. 21, Waterworth's Translation, p. 277. 

^'It is decreed that these heavenly 



INDULGENCES . 



105 



treasures of the Church are administered 
not for ^ain but for godliness.*' 

Sessions xxi, Chap. 9. 

The learned Cardinal Wiseman, in a 
pastoral letter, says: "Many persons will 
be inclined to incredulity when I tell them 
that an indulgence is no pardon for sin of 
^ any sort, past, present, or future. It is no 
more than a remission by the Church, in 
virtue of the keys, of a portion, or the 
entire, of the temporal punishment due 
to sin.*' 

Cardinal Wiseman. London Tablet, June 17, 1854. 

"The word indulgence originally signified 
favor, remission, or forgiveness. Now it is 
commonly used in the sense of unlawful 
gratification, and of free scope to the 
passions. Hence, when some ignorant or 
prejudiced persons hear of the Church 
granting an indulgence, the idea of license 
to sin is at once presented to their minds. 

An indulgence is simply a remission, in 



103 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



whole or in part, through the superabun- 
dant merits of Jesus Christ and His Saints, 
of the temporal punishment due to God on 
account of sin, after the guilt and eternal 
punishment have been remitted. 

It should be borne in mind that, even 
after our guilt is removed, there often 
remains some punishment to be undergone, 
either in this life or in the next, as an 
expiation to divine sanctity and justice " 

''Faith of Oar Fathers," Cardinal Gibbons, pp. 354-S5. 

''An indulgence is a remission of temxDoral 
punishment due to sin after the sin itself 
has been remitted, granted outside the 
sacrament of penance. In the sacrament 
of penance the temporal punishment is 
commuted into a lighter x^enance; by 
indulgence it is remitted; not simply, 
however^ but by the application of the 
satisfactions of Christ and of the saints 
entrusted to the Church's keeping. * 
Indulgences are salutary, not only because 



INDULGENCES. 



107 



they remit temporal punishment due to sin, 
but also because they encourage sinners to 
become reconciled to God, and promote 
the frequentation of the sacraments and 
the practice of good works. If. at times, 
almsgiving is lorescribed as a condition for 
gaining an indulgence, the indulgence is 
in that case no more purchased for money 
than heaven is purchased by any other 
alms given with a view to eternal salvation." 

Handbook of Christian Religion. Rev. W. Wilmers, S. J., 
N. Y. Benziger Bros., Pub., 1591 ; pp. 360-62. 

"Indulgence in Roman Catholic theology 
is defined as the remission, in whole or in 
part, by ecclesiastical authority, to the 
penitent sinner of the temporal punish- 
ment due for sin. 

* * "It must carefully be borne in mind 
that in Roman Catholic orthodoxy indul- 
gence is never absolutely gratuitous, and 
that those only can, in any circumstances, 
validly receive it who are in full communion 
with the Church, and have resorted to the 



108 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



sacrament of penance, in which alone, after 
due contrition and confession, provision is 
made for the graver penalty of sin." 

Encj'clopsedia Britannica, Vol. xii., pp. 846-47. 



THE CAUSE AND SUCCESS OF PROT- 
ESTANTISM. 



AUSE and pretext are two different 



\^ things. The occasion for the out- 
break of Lutheranism in Germany was the 
method pursued by Tetzel and other monks 
in the preaching and granting of indul- 
gences. As well might we attribute the 
American revolution to the destruction of 
the gunpowder stored at Lexington and 
Concord, 

" Where the embattled farmer stood 
And fired the shot heard round the world,"' 

as to make TetzePs extravagance and abuse 
the cause of the Protestant revolution. 
The Lexington gun set in motion multiform 
and latent causes that reached back for a 
generation. The fight on indulgences 
broadened into a clash of authority that 
swept into its current causes existing for 
centuries. 




110 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



These causes existed from the begimiin^' ■ 
of the Christian era, and they exist to-day. 
During the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies they expressed themselves in the 
heresies of Berengarius, the Albigenses, 
Peter Waldo, Huss, and Wycliffe. They 
have since continued to operate with Prot- 
estantism, splitting it up into numbers of 
warring sects, by means of local and 
provincial reformation-moves, such as the 
Methodist secession from the Church of 
England. 

The Protestant Eeformatlon, in' fact, does 
not differ in cause from the great heresies 
Yvhich preceded it. All had their source 
in the tendency of the human mind to 
set private judgment above established 
authority, whether in religion, law, or 
letters. 

The time was not ripe for a successful 
revolution when Wycliffe wrote, or when 
Berengarius preached; or these men lacked 
Luther's alternate cunning and boldness; 
or they failed to lay hold of the means and 



CAUSE OF PEOTESTAXTISM. 



Ill 



methods of success which he eagerly 
grasped. Here was the difference: it was 
not in cause, it was merely in circmnstauce 
and success. 

The moral and material conditioa of tlie 
Church was not bad at the epoch Luther 
appeared. It vras worse a century earlier 
— at the time of the "great schism.** The 
circumstances of the Lutheran movement, 
which miade it a successful revolution, may 
be briefly stated as follows: 

1. It everywhere sought the protection 
and support of Princes. The Emperor 
Maximilian, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 
and Phillip of Hesse were Luther's stead- 
fast friends. In the first instance, they 
favored him because of their dislike of the 
Papal i)ower. Afterwards he made it their 
interest to join forces with him. He flat- 
tered their power. He taught that they 
were rulers by divine right, and that 
uncpiestioning obedience was the religious 
duty of the subject. He made them the 
arbiters on ecclesiastical questions. A 



112 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



church subservient and accommodating to 
the civil power was exceedingly agreeable 
to potentates whose absolutism had always 
been, more or less, interfered with by 
bishops and Popes. In Sweden, Gustavus 
Yasa patronized the Reformation: in 
Denmark, Christian IT.; in England. 
Henry VIII., for a time, and Elizabeth; 
in France, the Court of Navarre and the 
Prince of Conde; in the Netherlands, 
William of Orang-e. 

2. It utilized the rich lands and treasures 
of the monasteries with astute policy. To 
the kings, electors and petty princes the 
reformers virtually said: ''Embrace our 
cause and we will give you the wealth of 
the monasteries and the churches. It will 
pay you well. It will fill your coffers, and 
the new religion will put a salve upon your 
consciences by calling this expedition of 
phinder a new crusade — a stroke against 
the minions of Satan and the disciples of 
anti-Christ.'' The bait to avarice worked 
powerful conversions: the adhesion of 



CAUSE OF PROTESTANTISM. 113 



princes to the new creed being followed by 
a public profession of faith by way of a raid 
on the convents. The Elector of Saxony 
filled his sideboard with vessels taken 
from the sacristies of churches. Luther 
remarked with shrewd humor: ''The 
ostensories of the churches made many 
converts to the new gospel." Gustavus 
Vasa, in Sweden, Christian of Denmark, 
and Henry VIIL of England, made the 
suppression of the monasteries the first act 
in the drama of the Reformation. 

After the wealth of the Church had gone 
to the kings and princes, and through them 
to the court favorites, the reformers could 
sagely say: ^'Our fortunes and yours are 
inseparable. If we fall, you lose your new 
properties. You read your title to them 
through our teachings. Let the old 
religion reconquer and there will have to 
be restitution." 

3. There is no doubt that the abolition of 
celibacy brought to the Protestant move- 
ment a great body of ex-monks who worked 



114 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



for it with the zeal of men working for the 
gratification of desires, and their own 
salvation from social obloquy. The 
Teutonic knights went over in a body, on 
this principle. The vituperation and vigor 
of the new gospel came, in a large degree, 
from this following. 

4. The art of printing was another, and, 
perhaps, a principal reason for the success, 
in 1517, of w^hat had failed in the previous 
centuries. The reformers made instant and 
effective use of this means of sowing broad- 
cast their views. They multiplied books, 
pamphlets, satires, burlesques, caricatures, 
and fiery appeals. These methods naturally 
moved the populace and w^on partisans. 

"Where Protestantism w^as an idea only, 
as in France and Italy, it was crushed out 
by the Inquisition; where, in conjunction 
with political jjower, and sustained by 
ecclesiastical confiscation, it became a 
physical force, there it v/as lasting. It is 
not a pleasant view^ to take of the doctrinal 



CAUSE OF PEOTESTANTISM. 



115 



cLaijges. to see that where the movements 
to\Yard it were pure and unworldly, it failed; 
where it was seconded by territorial greed 
and political animosity, it succeeded." 

Bishop Stubbs' Lectures on Mediaeyal and Modern His- 
tory, p. 233. 

''A king whose character may be best 
described by saying that he was despotism 
itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a 
rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, 
such were the instruments by which 
England was delivered from the yoke of 
Rome. The work which had been begun 
by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was 
continued by Somerset, the murderer of his 
brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the 
murderer of her guest." 

Macanlay's Essays. "Hailam." 

''We cannot but remember that libels, 
scarcely less scandalous than those of 
Hebert, mummeries scarcely less absurd 
than those of Clootz, and crimes scarcely 
less atrocious than those of Marat, disgrace 
the early history of Protestantism." 

Maaculay's Essays. ''Burleigh." 



116 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



"The 'Reformation from Popery' was 
completed in Elizabeth's reign, The 
history of this movement in Ireland, is, 
throughout, one of merciless persecution, 
of wholesale spoliation, and of murderous 
cruelty. The instruments by which it was 
accomplished were despotic monarchs, 
unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aris- 
tocracy, and venal and slavish parliaments. 
It sprung from brutal passion, was nurtured 
in selfish and corrupt policy, and was 
consummated in bloodshed and horrid 
crime. 'The work which had been begun 
by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was 
continued by Somerset, the murderer of his 
brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the 
murderer of her guest.' Such was the 
^Reformation,' and such were its instru- 
ments; and the consequences which flowed 
from it, at least in Ireland, were of a 
kindred character for centuries to come." 

Samuel Smiles, History of Ireland and the Irish People 
Under the Government of England. 



CAUSE OF PEOTESTANTISM. 



117 



"In Sweden the Reformation was estab- 
lished concurrently with the political 
revolution which placed Gustavus Yasa 
on the throne. It was, however, only too 
apparent that the patriot king was largely 
influenced by the expectation of replen- 
ishing his exhausted exchequer from the 
revenues of the Church, and, as in Germany 
and England, the assent of the nobility 
was gained by their admission to a consid- 
erable share in the confiscated property." 

Encyclopaedia Britannica, '"Reformation." XX., 336. 

"Whatever may be the bias of our minds 
as to the truth of Luther's doctrines, we 
should be very careful in considering the 
Reformation as a part of the history of 
mankind, not to be misled by the superficial 
and ungrounded representations which we 
sometimes find in modern writers, — like 
D'Aubigne, for example. Such is this, that 
Luther, struck by the absurdity of the 
prevailing superstitions, was desirous of 
introducing a more rational system of 



118 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



religion; or, that he contended for freedom 
of inquiry, and the boundless privileges of 
individual judgment; or, what others have 
been pleased to suggest, that his zeal for 
learning and ancient philosophy led him 
to attack the ignorance of the monks and 
the crafty policy of the Church, which 
withstood all liberal studies. These notions 
are merely fallacidus refinements, as every 
man of plain understanding — excepting, 
perhaps, D'Aubigne — who is acquainted 
with the writings of the early reformers, 
or who has considered their history, must 
acknowledge.*' 

Hallam, Hist, of Literature, Vol. I, p. J65. 



CHARACTER OF THE REFORMERS. 



UTHEK and Melanchthon were the 



I ' leaders of Protestantism in Germany,, 
Calvin and Zv/inglius in Prance and 
Switzerland, and John Knox in Scotland. 
In England and Sweden the monarchs, 
Henry YIII. and Gustavus Vasa, were the 
reformers. 

Luther was a man of force, audacity and 
great power of expression. He is criticised 
for his violence, his cunning, and his 
roystering. Melanchthon was the scholar 
of the Reformation, and the gentleman, 
too, perhaps. Beyond the charge of 
wavering in his doctrines and frequently 
changing his views, he is the least assailed 
of any of the reformers. Calvin was the 
master of a polished and logical style. 
His character was gloomy, revengeful, and 
despotic. Zwinglius was impetuous and 




120 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



warlike; lie died at tlie head of a band 
of soldiers in 1531. Knox, who has been 
termed the ''ruffian of the Reformation," 
was coarse, violent, and oloomy; but master 
of a style of rude eloquence that swayed, 
what he termed, the ^'rascally multitude.** 

All of these men, except Calvin and 
Melanchthon, had been ordained X3riests 
prior to their rupture with the Church. 
Luther married a nun; Knox signalized 
his revolt from Rome by taking a wife, and 
Calvin and Zwingiius married wealthy 
widows. 

Luther's sermons are the best evidences 
of his style. His shrewd ada^Dtation of 
doctrines to please princes and conciliate 
powerful magnates shows his cunning and 
-astuteness. He permitted Phillip of Hesse 
to have two wives, but he enjoined secrecy 
lest the ''rough peasants" might also claim 
that privilege. His "Table Talk" purjports 
to be a collection of his wit and wisdom 
delivered at the Black Eagle tavern, where 



CHAEACTEK OF THE REFOEMERS. 121 



he met boon companions and drank copious 
quantities of wine. The famous saying: 

" Who loves not woman, wine and song 
Remains a fool his whole life long," 

is Goethe's rendering of a sentiment very 
generally attributed to Luther. Hallam 
seems to believe the supposition '^almost 
justified that there was a vein of insanity 
in his very remarkable character.*' ^ 

Calvin's vindictiveness is sufl&ciently 
shown in his conduct towards Servetus. 
He lured his victim lo Geneva and then 
had him condemned to death. Geneva was 
governed by Blue Laws of a much stricter 
kind than those which prevailed in the 
New England colonies. At times the sway 
of Calvin is comparable to the French 
^' Reign of Terror," and the character of 
Marat, as drawn by Carlyle, is not unfitted 
for Calvin. 

''Here we may mention his [Luther's] 
attitude towards the second marriage of 



* Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, Ch. 2, p. 73 n. 



122 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



Phillip of Hesse. This prince, loving- 
another woman than his wife, secured the 
opinion from the Reformer that while 
monogamy was the original institution of 
God, cases might arise to justify bigamy; 
but the second marriage should, for pruden- 
tial reasons, be kept secret. The marriage 
took place March 3, 1540, in the presence 
of Melanchthon." 

Schalf-Herzog Dictionary. Article on "Luther." 

" It is idle to shield Calvin from the 
charge of bringing about Servetus' death, 
* * * but at the same time it is easy to 
excuse him on the ground of the perse- 
cuting spirit of the age. Strange as it 
may seem the Protestants who had felt the 
persecutions of Rome, were ready to perse- 
cute all who followed not with them." 

Schaif-Herzog Dictionary. Article on "Calvin." 

''In a conversation with Maitland, he 
[Knox] asserted most explicitly the duty 
of putting idolaters to death. Nothing can 
be more sanguinary than the Reformer's 



CHAKACTEE OF THE EEFORMERS. 123 



spirit in this extraordinary interview. St. 
Dominick could not have surpassed him. 
It is strange to see men professing all the 
time our modern creed of charity and 
toleration extol these sanguinary spirits of 
the sixteenth century.*' 

Hallam's Const. Kist. of England, I. Ch. 3, p. UT n. 



THE REFORMATION AND RELIGIOUS 
LIBERTY. 



TO what does the world of to-day owe 
such relii^ious liberty as it possesses? 
Certainly to no principle or tendency born 
of the Reformation time. The Spanish 
Inquisition was not abolished until 1814. 
Catholic emancipation from the persecu- 
tion of English Protestantism did not 
ensue until 1829. The nineteenth century 
came, but the laws of Saxony, disquali- 
fying Catholics from holding property, 
still persisted in the cradle of the Refor- 
mation." 

Down to 1850, it was still a capital offense 
for any Catholic clergyman to cross the 
Danish frontier; down to 1876, only Prot- 
estants could hold office in New Hampshire; 
and even in our own day no Catholic may 
hold an office of trust or honor in Sweden. 



RELIGIOUS LIBEETY. 



125 



The Protestant Reformation sought to 
substitute one form of orthodoxy for an- 
other. The old orthodoxy fought for its 
life; if Protestantism triumphed, it knew 
that the rack and the fagot would be its 
share. Religious hate and suspicion were 
engendered and persecutions followed as a 
natural consequence. 

Religious liberty came only after the 
Reformation movement had run its course, 
and freedom of conscience is a reaciion 
rather than a result, 

Luther taught and preached the propriety 
and need of religious persecution. So did 
Calvin. The heavy treatise that the latter 
wrote on the ''Punishment of Heretics'* may 
still be consulted by any reader who wishes 
to study the arguments justifying the 
burning of human beings for religious 
differences. Luther had his victim in 
Karlstadt, whom he banished and exiled. 
Calvin had his victim in Servetus, whom he 
decoyed to Geneva and burned. 

These apostles were zealously followed in 



126 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



this particular by all their disciples. Beza, 
in France, and the leading English church- 
men, even down to the eighteenth century, 
were believers in the right and duty of 
persecution for religious convictions. 

The policy of nations was guided by that 
belief. The first condition of religious 
intolerance — a union of Church and State — 
was taken at the start by every country 
which adopted Protestantism. The triumph 
of the Reformation was always marked by 
the immediate promulgation of laws against 
Catholics and dissenters. This was the 
case in Hesse and Saxony; under Gustavus 
Vasa in Sweden; under Elizabeth in 
England ; and under the House of Orange 
in the Netherlands. 

The colonists of Massachusetts, fleeing 
from religious tyranny, — and whom we 
might naturally expect would spurn that 
which had exiled them — were yet so imbued 
with the cult of the Reformation time that 
they re-enacted, on American soil, the 
odious intolerance of their mother country. 



EELIGIOUS LIBEETY. 



127 



Quakers were imprisoned, BaiDtists were 
banished, and "Papists" were pilloried and 
tortured. 

Men had to forget the unnatural feelings 
born of the Beformation time, and to revert 
to natural common sense before they 
concluded to o-ive up persecution. The 
hates, the envies, and the prejudices of the 
religious upheaval had to be cleared away 
before men's minds could calmly arrive at 
an earnest desire for toleration. When 
there is an outcrojoping of the old spirit we 
may be sure that it is a reversion to what 
has been termed the '^fury of the 
Reformation time." 

"Catholicism was an ancient Church. 
She had gained a great part of her influ- 
ence by vast services to mankind. She 
rested avowedly on the lorinciple of 
authority. She was defending herself 
against aggression and innoyation. ^ * 
She might point to the priceless blessings 
she had bestowed upon humanity, to the 



128 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



slavery she had destroyed, to the civili- 
zation she had founded, to the many 
generations she had led with honor to the 
grave. She might show how completely 
her doctrines were interwoven with the 
whole social system, how fearful would be 
the convulsion if they were destroyed, and 
how absolutely incompatible they were 
with the acknowledgment of private judg- 
ment. These considerations would not 
make her blameless, but they would, at 
least, palliate her guilt."' 

"But what shall we say of a church that 
was but a thing of yesterday; a church 
that had as yet no services to show, no 
claims upon the gratitude of mankind; a 
church that was by profession the creature 
of private judgment, and was in reality 
generated by the intrigues of a corrupt 
court, which nevertheless suppressed by 
force a worship that multitudes deemed 
necessary to salvation- which by all her 
organs, and with all her energies, perse- 
cuted those who clung to the religion of 



EELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 



129 



their fathers? What shall we say of a 
religion which comprised^ at most, but a 
fourth part of the Christian world, and 
which the first ex^Dlosion of private judg- 
ment had shivered into countless sects, 
which was nevertheless so pervaded by the 
spirit of dogmatism that each of these 
sects asserted its distinctive doctrines with 
the same confidence, and x^ersecuted with 
the same unhesitating violence, as a church 
which was venerable with the homage of 
twelve centuries? ^ * ^ So strong and so 
general was its intolerance that for some 
time it may, I believe, be truly said that 
there were more instances of partial 
toleration being advocated by Roman 
Catholics than by orthodox Protestants." 

Lecky. " Eationalism in Europe." Vol. I. p. 51. ed. 1870. 

"The Reformation of the sixteenth 
century was not aware of the true 
principles of intellectual liberty. ^ * ^ 
On the one side it did not know or resi^ect 
all the rights of human thought; at the 
very moment it was demanding these rights 



130 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



for itself it was violating them toward 
otliers. On the other hand it was unable 
to estimate the rights of authority in the 
matters of reason." 

Guizot, History of Civilization, pp. 261-2. 

^'It is evident, moreover, * ^ * that the 
Reformers, just as much as the Papists, 
held it a right to inflict coercion, physical 
pains, and death upon those who denied 
what they regarded as the essential faith; it 
was a century and a half before Protestants 
learned definitely that they had no right to 
inflict death, imprisonment, stripes, or fines 
upon heretics. * * * Calvin burnt Servetus 
for heresy: the mild Melanchthon approved 
the act; so did Bucer. (Calv. Epist. p. 147, 
Genoa, 1575.) Calvin, in his letter to the 
Earl of Somerset, Lord Primate of England 
(Epist. 67), speaking of the Papists and of 
the fanatic sect of ''Gospellers," says 
expressively, ''they ought to be repressed 
by the avenging sword.*' Speaking of 
executions in England for religious opinions 



EELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 



131 



Hazlitt sa3^s: ^'It appears many were put 
to death in the reign of Henry VIII; some 
in the time of Edward VI; one hundred 
and sixty Roman Catholics in the reign of 
Elizabeth; sixteen or seventeen in that of 
James; and more than twenty by the 
Presbyterians and Republicans." 

Hazlitt, Notes to his Edition of Guizot's History of Civil- 
ization, pp. 266-7. 

"Persecution is the deadly original sin of 
the reformed churches; that which cools 
every honest man's zeal for their cause in 
proportion as his reading becomes more 
extensive." 

Hallam, Constitutional History of England, I, ch. 2, p. 10 5 . 

"In the Palatinate, a Calvinistic prince 
persecuted the Lutherans. In Saxoay a 
Lutheran prince persecuted the Calvinists. 
Everybody who objected to any of the 
articles of the Confession of Augsburg 
was banished from Sweden. In Scot- 
land, Melville was disputing with other 
Protestants on questions of ecclesiastical 



132 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



government. In England the jails were 
filled with men, who, though zealous for 
the Reformation, did not exactly agree with 
the Court on all points of discipline 
and doctrine. Some were persecuted for 
denying the tenet of reprobation; some for 
not wearing surplices." 

Macaulay's Essays. (Review of Yon Ranke's Hist, of 
Popes.) 

''When the Reformation triumphed in 
Scotland, one of its first fruits was a law 
prohibiting any priest from celebrating, or 
any worshipper from hearing, mass, under 
pain of the confiscation of his goods for 
the first offense, of exile for the second, and 
of death for the third. That the Queen of 
Scotland should be permitted, to hear mass 
in her own x^i'iYate chapel was publicly 
denounced as an intolerable evil. 'One 
mass,' exclaimed Knox, 'is more fearful to 
me than if 10,000 armed enemies were 
landed in part of the realm.' In France, 
when the goYernment of certain towns was 



EELIGIOUS LIBEETY. 



133 



conceded to the Protestants, they immedi- 
ately employed their power to supi3ress 
absolutely the Catholic worship, to prohibit 
any Protestant from attending a marriage 
or a funeral that was celebrated by a jpriest, 
to put down all mixed marriages, and to 
prosecute, to the full extent of their power 
those who had abandoned their creed. In 
Sweden, all who dissented from any article 
of the Confession of Augsburg were at 
once banished.. As late as 1690 a synod 
was held at Amsterdam, consisting partly 
of Dutch and partly of French and English 
ministers, who were driven to Holland by 
persecution, and in that synod the doctrine 
that the magistrate has no right to crush 
heresy and idolatry by the civil power was 
unanimously pronounced to be 'false, scan- 
dalous, and pernicious.' " 

Lecky's Rationalism in Europe, Vol. II., pp. 49-50. 

"The patriot reformers were ambitious of 
succeeding the tyrants whom they had 
dethroned. They imposed, with equal 
vigor, their creeds and confessions; they 



m MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



asserted the right of the magistrate to 
XJunish the heretic with death." 

Gibbon, Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 54. 

''Rome had at least prescription on its 
side. But Protestant intolerance, despotism 
in an upstart sect, infallibility claimed by 
guides who acknowledge that they had 
passed the greater part of their lives in 
error, restraints imposed on the liberty of 
private judgment at the pleasure of rulers 
who could vindicate their own proceedings 
only by asserting the liberty of private judg- 
ment, these things could not long be borne. 
Those who had pulled down the crucifix 
could not long continue to persecute for 
the surplice. It required no great sagacity 
to perceive^the^inconsistency and dishonesty 
of men who, dissenting from almost all 
Christendom, would suffer none to dissent 
from themselves; who demanded freedom 
of conscience, yet refused to grant it; 
who execrated persecution, yet persecuted; 
who urged reason against the authority of 



RELIGIOUS LIBEETY. 



135 



one opponent, and authority against the 
reason of another." 

Macaulay's Essays. "Hampden." 

"It must be admitted that in Scotland 
there is more bigotry, more superstition, 
and a more thorough contempt for the 
religion of others, than there is in France, 
And in Sweden, which is one of the oldest 
Protestant countries in Europe, there is, 
not occasionally, but habitually, an intoler- 
ance and a spirit of persecution, which 
would be discreditable to a Catholic 
country; but which is doubly disgraceful 
when proceeding from a people who profess 
to base their religion on the right of 
private judgment." 

Buckle's History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, p. 264. 

"The suffering of the Protestants had 
failed to teach them the worth of religious 
liberty; and a new code of ecclesiastical 
laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by 
a board of commissioners as a substitute 
for the Canon law of the Catholic Church, 



136 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



althou^'h it shrank from the penalty of 
death, attached that of perpetual imprison- 
ment or exile to the crimes of heresy, 
blasphemy, and adultery, and declared 
excommunication to involve a severance of 
the offender from the mercy of God and his 
deliverance into the tyranny of the devil." 

G-reen. History of the English People, etc., Book vi., Ch. 
1, "The Eeformation," p. 226. 

^^The spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism 
excluded all toleration of practice or belief. 
* * For heresy there was to be the 
punishment of death. Never had the 
doctrine of persecution been urged with 
such a blind and reckless ferocity. ' I 
deny,' wrote Cartwright, 'that upon repent- 
ance there ought to follow any pardon of 
death. Heretics ought to be put to death 
now.' " 

Id., Book vi., Ch. 5. "England and the Papacy." 

''If the Protestant lords in Scotland had 
been driven to assert a right of noncon- 
formity, if the Huguenots of France were 



EELIGIOUS LIBEETY. 



137 



followino^ their example, it was with no 
thought of asserting the right of every man 
to worship God as he would. From the 
claim of such a right, Knox or Coligni 
would have shrunk with even greater horror 
than Elizabeth. What they aimed at was 
simply the establishment of a truce till, by 
force or persuasion, they could win the 
realms that tolerated them for their own." 

Id., Book vi., Ch. 3. "England of Elizabeth." 

"The era of the long Parliament was 
that, perhaps, which witnessed the greatest 
number of executions for witchcraft. Three 
thousand persons are said to have perished 
during the continuance of the sittings of 
that body by legal execution, independently 
of summary deaths at the hands of the 
mob.*' 

Chambers' EncyclopEedia. 

"Even Milton, it may be observed here, 
did not carry his doctrine of liberty of 
conscience so far as to lead him to favor 
the toleration of the mass and other 



138 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



ceremonies of Roman Catholic worship, 
which, as being idolatrous, he thought 
should be forbidden." 

Fisher, V'History of the Reformation," Ch. 15. 



THE REFORMATION AND CIVIL LIBERTY. 



HE denial of free will by the early 



1 Protestants, and Luther's exaggera- 
tion of the obedience due lorinces, were 
tendencies adverse to progress in civil 
liberty; but their influence was slight 
compared with that of other circumstances 
growing out of the conflict of creeds. 

No inconsiderable progress had been 
made in political freedom at the epoch 
when Luther appeared. In England, 
France, Spain, and Germany, we find 
Parliaments, States General, Cortes, and 
Diets. The people had acquired represen- 
tative forms. The ancient liberties of 
England were formulated in the Magna 
Oharta; there was trial by jury and there 
was the habeas corpus. Free cities flour- 
ished; and in Italy, the Kepublics of Genoa, 
Venice, Sieuna, Florence, and Pisa> 




140 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOKY. 



conserved great iDopular liberties. With 
the natural momentum of progress, and the 
art of printing, there should have been no 
halt or retrogression. 

Unhappily, this was precisely what 
occurred after the Protestant movement 
was fairly launched. In some instances, 
popular excesses, the revolts of the 
Anabaptists, and the anarchy caused by 
the new teaching, led to a reaction towards 
strong government. In other places the 
reformers courted the support of the 
princes and kings by clothing them with 
religious authority taken from the Pope. 
The Prince, uniting the authority of head 
of the State and head of the Church, 
became absolute and uncurbed. 

This was the case in England, where the 
Parliament showed itself the pliant tool of 
Henry VIII., and where James I. proclaimed 
the doctrine of kingly divine right. It 
explains the unequaled absolutism of the 
Lutheran princes of Germany and the King 
of Prussia, even as late as the eighteenth 



CIVIL LIBEETY. 



141 



century. The same train of events blotted 
out all representative forms in Denmark 
under Frederick III., in 1669. and in 
Sweden under Charles XL. in 1680. 

In fact, Protestantism and absolutism 
were simultaneous eras. A century after 
Luther, representative government has 
fallen into decay. Strong centralized 
monarchies rule all Europe; in France by 
virtue of the religious wars, and in Spain 
by reason of contagious example abroad. 

The liberty of the press, which was little 
restricted during the first half century of 
printing, becomes the subject of close 
surveillance in the epochs of religious 
conflict, ensuing. The freedom with which 
Erasmus criticises princes in the early 
portion of the sixteenth century, is 
punished as sedition in the seventeenth. 
Milton makes a timid and unavailing plea 
for more liberty; yet things have only 
slightly bettered even a hundred years after 
Milton. 

We might naturally expect that in the 



U2 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



turmoil of religious conflict there would be 
a notable loss of respect for life and 
property. The persecution of recusants 
and the confiscation of church property 
were not without a demoralizing influence 
on the safety of human life and the security 
of all kinds of property. Law and liberty 
go hand in hand. In the midst of civil 
conflict and religious hatred the conditions 
for progress in political freedom, were 
decidedly unfavorable. There was univer- 
sal regress, and then slow recovery. Civil 
liberty made greater strides in the first 
thirty years of the nineteenth century than 
in all the three hundred years preceding. 



''In Germany, far from demanding polit- 
ical liberty, the Reformation accepted, I 
shall not say servitude, but the absence 
of liberty (p. 259)." * * * It rather 
strengthened than enfeebled the power of 
princes; it was rather opposed to the free 
institutions of the middle ages than 
favorable to their progress (p. 258). ^ * 



OlYIL LIBERTY. 



143 



In England it consented to the existence 
of a church as full of abuses as ever the 
Komish Church had been, and much more 
servile (p. 259). ^ ^ It doubtless left the 
mind subject to all the chances of liberty 
or thraldom which might arise from 
political institutions." 

Guizot. "History of Civilization," pp. 25S-9 

"All that men saw was political and 
religious chaos, in which ecclesiastical order 
had perished, and in which politics was 
dying down into the squabbles of a knot 
of nobles over the spoils of the church and 
crown." 

Green's Hist, of the English People. Book yi., Ch. 1, 'The 
Reformation.' 

''In 1549 Devonshire demanded, by open 
revolt, the restoration of the mass and the 
Six Articles, as well as a partial re-estab- 
lishment of the suppressed abbeys. The 
Agrarian discontent woke again in general 
disorder. Enclosures and evictions were 
going steadily on, and the bitterness of the 



IM MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



change was being heigthened by the results 
of the dissolution of the abbeys. Church 
lands had always been underlet, the monks 
were easy landlords, and on no estates had 
the peasantry been as yet so much exempt 
from the general revolution in culture. 
But the new lay masters, to whom the 
abbey lands fell, were quick to reap their 
full value by a rise of rents, and by the 
same processes of eviction and enclosure as 
went on elsewhere." 

Id., VI, ch. 1. 

^' While the reckless energy of the 
reformers brought England to the verge 
of chaos it brought Ireland to the verge 
of rebellion." 

Id., VI, Chap. 1. 

"The immediate effect of the Reformation 
in England was by no means favorable to 
political liberty. The authority which had 
been exercised by the Popes was transferred 
almost entire to the King. Two formidable 
powers, which had often served to check 



CIVIL LIBERTY. 



145 



each other, were united in a single despot. 
If the system on which the founders of the 
Church of England acted could have been 
permanent, the Reformation would have 
been, in a political sense, the greatest curse 
that ever fell on our country. * * * " 

Macaulay's Essays. "Hampden." 

''Not only freedom of thought, but civil 
liberty also suffered much in many states 
of Europe, and especially in Germany from 
the religious schism. In this country the 
revolt of the peasants and the discontent of 
the nobles were the pretext; the power of 
the princes, so augmented by the confisca- 
tion of church property and their own 
close alliance with each other, was the 
cause of these numerous restrictions upon 
ancient freedom." 

Schlegel, Lectures on Modern History. (Lecture 15 and 
16, p. 209.) 



TWO POLITICAL THEORIES OF THE 
REFORMATION TIME. 



HAT Kings hold their power directly 



1 from God, and, consequently, are 
responsible to Him only for their acts, is, 
in substance, the doctrine of 'Hhe divine 
and indefeasible right of Kings." The 
teaching of the Catholic and Papal theolo- 
gians made monarchs responsible to the 
people from whom they immediately held 
their authority. Louis of Bavaria, in his 
struggle against the Pope, was the first 
strong advocate of the divine-right theory. 
To bolster up his authority against the 
censures of Rome, he sought to read his 
title direct from the Diety, rather than 
through the good graces of his Christian 
subjects. 

The rise of the great monarchies in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made 




EEFORMATION TIME. 



]47 



this mischievous theory really formidable. 
When James I. published his plea for what 
Pope wittily calls 

" The right divine of Kings to govern wrong," 

he was ably answered by the Jesuit 
theologian, Suarez. The theologians saw 
in the divine right of kings a piece 
of hypocritical politics aiming at the 
destruction of the Church's spiritual 
independence, and the substitution of 
Csesarism and absolutism. 

So the theory operated in the case of 
Louis XIV., with his autocratic boast: 
''L^etat &est moi.^^ He made it the basis 
of usurping Papal prerogatives. Finally, 
democracy has come round to the views of 
the churchmen on the subject, and the 
People-King is the only custodian of divine 
rights recognized in our day. 

The principle, Cujus regio, ejus religio, 
is the expressive Latin of a peace plan 
adopted at the treaty of Augsburg, in 1555, 
and endorsed nearly a hundred years later 



148 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



at the treaty of Westphalia. The religion 
of the prince or elector of a state was to 
determine the religion of his subjects. 
Menzel describes this principle as "a result 
of Luther's well-known policy.'' . The 
reformers succeeded in all cases by winning 
the civil authority on their side at the 
beginning. To enforce the religion of the 
prince upon his subjects always brought on 
a struggle, and it was needful to lay hold of 
a plan like that asserted in Cujus regio, 
ejus religio. In one instance — that of 
Pf alz — the religion of the people was 
changed arbitrarily four times by reason 
of this principle. Its survival in Germany, 
especially among the Lutheran princes, is a 
noticeable circumstance even to-day. Yet 
there never was a theory more odious, both 
in the light of civil as well as of religious 
liberty. 

It is notorious that as soon as the 
decay of the feudal system had thrown the 
mediseval constitutions out of working 



EEFOEMATION TI3IE. 



order, and when tlie reformation had 
discredited the authority of the Pope, the 
doctrine of the divine right of kings rose 
immediately into an importance which had 
never before attended it." 

Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, p. 334. 

"It is remarkable that in opposition to 
these novel dogmas [of the Jesuits] there 
appeared on the Protestant side a theory of 
the divine right of Kings and the related 
doctrine of passive obedience. ^ ^ ^ The 
advocates of freedom and revolt against 
spiritual authority are equally strenuous 
for slavish maxims of political obedience." 

Fisher's "History of the Reformation," Ch. 14, pp. 505-6. 



THE REFORMATION AND LITERATURE. 



HE revival of literature was well 



1 under way when the Protestant 
Reformation burst forth. Printin<^, pa^oer 
manufacture, the fall of Constantinople, 
and the discovery of America, were four 
important impulses to progress that had 
transpired during the latter half of the 
fifteenth century. 

In literature and art, Europe was 
decidedly on the upgrade. The Reforma- 
tion, largely from the nature of the case 
and incidentally by reason of its teachings, 
tended to retard this literary and 
intellectual advancement. 

1. It was a revolution accompanied 
everywhere by turmoil and disorder. 
Force, rather than reason, decided the fate 
of the conflict. Cabals and plots, surprises 
and coup d'^etats, wars, sieges and massa- 




EEFORMATION AND LITEEATURE. 151 



cres, ^Ye^e the events of the day. These 
conditions have never favored literary and 
intellectual progress at any period of the 
world's history. Men's minds are drawn 
away from the pursuits of peace, the culture 
of the arts and the sciences, and the 
upbuilding of useful knowledge. There is 
no stability of national desire. The 
concern of every man is for the protec- 
tion of the goods he has — life and 
property — rather than for acquisition and 
improvement. 

2. Such literature as most prevailed in 
the Reformation period, was of the 
controversial order — and this, not scholarly 
or valuable, but fashioned after the pattern 
set by Luther — rough, violent, disputatious, 
and bad tempered. The literary field was 
overgrown with this kind of weed, and 
seemingly sterile to the production of aught 
else. 

3. For nearly fifty years (1520-70) 
England produced no literature of any 
value, and in Germany the sterility and 



152 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



blight in letters lasted for two hundred 
years after Luther. Not until the time of 
Liebnitz did Germany begin to re-possess a 
literature. 

4. The breaking up of the monasteries, 
which constituted the common school system 
of the middle ages, had an unfavorable 
effect on literature as well as upon the 
intelligence of the masses. 

There was everywhere a falling off in 
the attendance at the universities. The 
essential importance of these nurseries of 
learning was never greater, relatively, than 
at the time of the Keformation. Their 
injury was the hurt of everything 
intellectual throughout Europe. 

6. Certain forms of Protestantism were 
distinctly unfavorable to literature. The 
Anabaptists burned libraries and decried 
education. Calvinism warred on art and 
poetry, as frivolous and diabolical. Among 
the Puritans there was a dislike for all 
kinds of human learning which were not 
Biblical or theological in their purjjoses. 



REFORMATION AND LITERATURE. 



153 



The theater was an abomination: and the 
study of the classics — to which England 
owed her literary renaissance — was likened 
unto the pursuit of false gods. 

6. Growing out of the suspicion and 
hate of warring creeds, stricter censorship 
was established over the press. Books 
w^ere condemned and suppressed. Authors 
were constrained to tell half truths. 
Criticism was gagged. The heterodox in 
politics and science was punished equally 
with the heterodox in religion. There 
was far greater freedom of thought and 
speech in the Europe of the fifteenth 
century than in the Europe of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 



"The most striking effect of the first 
preaching of the Reformation was that it 
appealed to the ignorant.*' 

Hallam, Int. to Literature of Europe. Vol. I. p. 181. 

"For, though the Protestant Reformation 
was a consequence of this progress [revival 



154: MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of learning], it was for some time unfavor- 
able to it, by encouraging the ablest men 
in the discussion of questions inaccessible 
to human reason, and thus diverting them 
from subjects in which their efforts would 
have been available for the general 
purposes of civilization. Hence, we find 
that little was really accomplished until 
the end of the sixteenth century, when the 
theological fervor began to subside in 
England and France, and the way was 
prepared for that purely secular pliilosoi)hy, 
of which Bacon and Descartes were the 
exponents, but by no means the creators." 

Buckle's History of Civilization in England. Vol. I., p. 329. 

'•Among the effects of the Reformation in 
England during Edward VI's reign, 
Green notes that "divinity ceased to be 
taught in the universities; students had 
fallen off in numbers; libraries were 
scattered and burned; and the intellectual 
impulse had died away." 

Green's Hist, of English People. Book vi., Ch. 1, p. 337. 



EEFOmiATIOX AND LITEEATURE. 155 



Classical learning, indeed, all but 
XDerislied at the Universities in the storm 
of the Reformation, nor did it revive here 
till the close of Elizabeth's reign." 

Green, Book vi., Ch. 7, (England of Shakespeare.) 

^'Missals were chopxoed in pieces with 
hatchets, college libraries j)l^iid.ered and 
burned. The divinity schools were x^lanted 
with cabbages, and the Oxford laundresses 
dried clothes in the schools of art.'* 

Froude, Hist, of England, Vol. v, Ch. 5. 

" In Protestant countries, after the 
JReformation, the supervision of the 
printing and circulation of books devolved 
upon the State. A tiring and meddle- 
some censorshi]p, and sometimes a severe 
penal code were established by various 
governments." 

Fisher, History of the Reformation, Ch. 15, p. 527. 

Matthew Arnold [Schools and Univer- 
sities of the Continent, p. 154], speaks of 
the Elizabethan literature as the work of 



156 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



" men of the Renaissance, not men of the 
Reformation." Taine, in his " History of 
English Literature," entitles his chapter 
the Elizabethan age, " The Pagan 
Renaissance." 

Motley describes the iconoclastic move- 
ments of the Reformation in the 
Netherlands. "The Netherlands," he says, 
"possessed an extraordinary number of 
churches and monasteries. Their exquisite 
architecture and elaborate decoration had 
been the earliest indication of intellectual 
culture displayed in the country. All that 
science could invent, all that art could 
embody, all that mechanical, ingenuity 
could dare, all that wealth could lavish — 
all gathered round these magnificent 
temples. * * And now, for the space of 
only six or seven days and nights, there 
raged a storm by which all these treasures 
were destroyed. Nearly every one of these 
temples were rifled of their contents. Art 
must forever weep over this bereavement. 

* The mob rose in the night in Antwerp, 



EEFOEMATION AND LITEEATURE. 157 



and began by wrecking the great cathedral 
church of Our Lady, and before morning 
they sacked thirty churches within the 
walls. * * * They destroyed seventy 
chapels, forced open all the chests of 
treasure, covered their own squalid attire 
with the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, 
and burned the splendid missals and manu- 
scripts. * * ^ Hardly a statue or picture 
escaped destruction. The number of 
churches desecrated has never been counted. 
In the single province of Flanders four 
hundred were sacked," 

Motley. "Rise of the Dutch Republic." vol. I, ch. 7. 



''BLOODY MARY" AND "GOOD QUEEN 
BESS." 



HESE expressions give iis a remark- 



1 able illustration of how religious 
animosity may color history. The 
unimpeachable truth is that Mary was at 
least as good as Elizabeth, and Elizabeth 
was at least as bloody as Mary. 

Both royal ladies persecuted — but with 
this difference: Mary persecuted Protest- 
ants, and Elizabeth persecuted Catholics. 
In our day, either kind of persecution is 
equally wrong and reprehensible. Not so. 
in other and less tolerant days. The age 
that coined these expressions thought Mary 
•'bloody" for the killing she did, but it 
thought Bess ''good*' because she did her 
killing on the other side. Judgments which 
depend upon "whose ox is gored," are of no 
historical value. Adjectives like ''good" 




MAKY AND ELIZABETH. 



159 



and ^'bloody," based on such judgments, 
are little better. 

The victims of Mary's persecution 
numbered two hundred and eighty-four, 
according to Burnett; two hundred and 
eighty-eight, according to Strype; '"above 
two hundred," says Miss Strickland, and 
" almost two hundred," according to 
Lingard. They were chiefly laymen, few 
clergymen suffering death. 

The Catholic victims under Elizabeth 
amounted to one hundred and ninety-one 
according to Dodd, and to two hundred and 
four according to Milner. "Many others," 
says Hallam, "died of hardship in prison." 
Lingard ascertains from contem^oorary lists 
that one hundred and twenty-four Catholic 
priests were executed. Challoner thinks 
that the number of priests alone who 
suffered death was nearly two hundred. 

Mary's persecution lasted four years; 
Elizabeth's, forty-four. The fines for 
recusancy, the banishments, the imprison- 
ments, and torture which characterize 



160 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



Elizabeth's reign are more impressive of 
the horrors of persecution than even the 
hangings and burnings at Tyburn. Strype 
tells us that at one of the assizes in 
Hampshire four hundred recusants were 
presented, and at another in Lancashire, 
six hundred. Bridgewater states that at 
one time twenty Catholic recusants died 
of infectious disease in York Castle 

The rack seldom stood idle in the tower 
for ail the latter part of Elizabeth's reign," 
says Hallam. "Such excessive severities," 
he continues, "under the x^r^text of treason, 
but sustained by very little evidence of any 
other offense than the exercise of Catholic 
ministry, excited indignation throughout a 
good part of Europe.'' * 

As to the comparative characters of 
Mary and Elizabeth, Miss Strickland's 
"Queens of England"' seems to place a 
much higher estimation on that of the 
former than on the latter. 



* Const. History of England. Vol. I., p. 201. 



MARY AND ELIZABETH. 



161 



" The Catholics did not, at the time of 
Elizabeth's accession, rise in arms to seat a 
pretender to the throne. But before Mary 
had given, or could give, provocation, the 
most distinguished Protestants attempted 
to set aside her rights in favor of the Lady 
Jane. That attem^ot, and the subsequent 
insurrection of Wyatt, furnished as good a 
plea for the burning of Protestants as the 
conspiracies of Mary against Elizabeth 
furnish for the hanging and emboweling of 
Papists." 

Macaulay's Essays. " HaUam." 

It is due, indeed, to the memory of one 
who has left so odious a name, to remark 
that Mary was conscientiously averse to 
encroach upon what she understood to be 
the privileges of her people. A wretched 
book, having been written to exalt her 
prerogative on the ridiculous pretense that, 
as queen, she was not bound by the laws of 
former kino-s. she showed it to Gardiner. 



162 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



and, on his expressing his indignation at 
the sophism, threw it herself into the fire.'' 

Hallam's Constitutional Hist, of England. Vol. I, p. 55. 

''To modern eyes there is something even 
more revolting than open persecution in a 
policy which branded every Catholic loriest 
as a traitor and all Catholic wo'rship as 
disloyal.*^ * ^ 

''An act to retain the Queen's Majesty's 
subjects in due obedience x^i'ohibited the 
saying of mass even in private houses, 
increased the fine on recusants to twenty 
pounds a month, etc.'' * ^ 

"If we adopt the Catholic estimate of the 
times, the twenty years which followed 
[1580-1600] saw the execution of two 
hundred priests while a yet greater number 
perished in filthy and fever-stricken goals, 
in which they were plunged. The work of 
reconciliation with Rome was arrested by 
this ruthless energy." 

Green's Hist, of the English People. Book vi., Ch. 5. 
"England and the Papacy." 



MAEY AND ELIZABETH. 



163 



"Being herself [Queen Elizabeth] an 
Adiaphorist, having no scruple about 
conforming to the Romish Church when 
conformity was necessary to her own safety, 
retaining to the last moment of her life a 
fondness for much of the doctrine and 
much of the ceremonial of that church, she 
yet subjected that church to a persecution 
even more odious than the persecution 
with which her sister had harassed the 
Protestants. We say more odious. For 
Mary had at least the plea of fanaticism. 
She did nothing for her religion which she 
was not prepared to suffer for it. She had 
held it firmly under persecution. She fully 
believed it to be essential to salvation. If 
she burned the bodies of her subjects, it 
was in order to rescue their souls. 
Elizabeth had no such pretext. In opinion 
she was little more than half a Protestant. 
She had professed, when it suited her, to 
be wholly a Catholic.*' 

Macaulay's Essays. "Burleigh and His Times." 



THE INQUISITION. 



TWENTY-TWO thousand persons 
suffered death for theft in England 
during the thirty-eight years of a single 
reign. The justice of our ancestors was a 
bloody affair. 

Sir James Stephen, in his "History 
of the English Criminal Law" (p. 467), 
says: "If the average number of executions 
in each county were twenty, a little more 
than a quarter of the executions in 
Devonshire, in 1598, this would make 
eight hundred executions a year in the 
forty English counties" — or, 80,000 in the 
course of a century. Mackay, in a work 
entitled "Curious Superstitions" (p. 237), 
says that 40,000 witches were put to death 
in England from 1600 to 1680.^ 



* Hefele stiows that at Nordingen — a Protestant town of 
Germany, having then a population of 6,000 — the authorities 



THE IXQUISITIOX. 



165 



The Spanish Inquisition dealt v^'ith 
polygamy, witchcraft, treason, heresy, and 
a variety of other offenses. During the 
fifteen years that Torquemada ^Yas Chief 
Inquisitor, the historian. Mariana, says that 
two thousand executions were reported. 
Llorente estimates the capital X3unishments 
under the Spanish Inquisition at thirty 
thousand, during the three centuries of its 
existence. According to Llorente, the 
Spanish tribunal took cognizance of many 
crimes besides heresy; of sins against 
nature, of ecclesiastical and monastic 
immoralities; of blasphemy, usury, and 
sacrilegious theft; of all crimes connected 
with the employes or affairs of the tribunal; 
of traffic in contraband of war, and of every 
kind of sorcery and superstition. 

There are iDositive complaints of gross 

bumed, in four years (1590-94:), thirty-fiye sorcerers. Apply- 
ing these proportions to Spain, where sorcery was then at 
least as prevalent, there should have been in four years 
50,000 sorcerers executed in that country ; that is, 20,000 more 
than Llorente assigns as victims of every kind to the Spanish 
Inquisition during its career of 330 years. 



166 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



inaccuracy against Llorente, and some 
glaring mistakes are pointed out in his 
history.*' 

He took a novel method of making an 
authority of himself. Having obtained 
custody of the archives of the Inquisition 
when Joseph Bonaparte captured Madrid, 
he used select portions, chosen with the 
avowed intent of blackening its record, and 
then burnt the original documents so that 
no future historian could gainsay him. 

The Spanish Inquisition is merely a 
tangible instance of the civil polity that 
prevailed contemporaneously throughout 
Europe. There was also a Portuguese 
Inquisition and a Roman Inquisition. 
There was a Protestant Inquisition in 
England which burnt its victims at Tyburn 

*He says, for instance, "that during the first year of its 
existence (1481) the sole tribunal of Seville burned 2,000, all 
of whom belonged to the dioceses of Seville and Cadiz." In 
support of this charge he cites Mariana ; but a consultation 
of that historian will reveal that the number of 2,000 includes 
all the persons executed under Torquemada, and throughout 
his entire jurisdiction — that is, in the whole of Castile and 
Leon, during fifteen years of inquisitorship. 



THE INQUISITION. 



167 



and a Calvinistic Inquisition at Geneva. 
There was an American colonial Inquisi- 
tion during the Salem witchcraft. The 
civil polity of those times made treason to 
faith, a crime against the State. 

To determine whether the accused was 
really guilty of heresy, a tribunal was set 
up, with priests among the judges. They 
were theological experts in the employ of 
the State. The tribunal was regarded as 
a political institution. Just as witchcraft 
came before the courts in England and 
America as a crime against the State, so 
witchcraft and heresy went before the 
tribunal called the Inquisition. 

The Pope, who had consented to the 
establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, 
eventually found himself at variance with 
it. Sixtus IV. complained of its severity, 
and admonished the Spanish monarchs to 
be more merciful. A later Pope excom- 
municated the Inquisitors of Toledo; and 
Papal antipathy kept the institution out of 
Italy. But this Church hostility did not 



168 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTOKY. 



persuade the Spaniards to give up what 
they thought a very useful political 
machine. The spirit of the age was with it. 
It was founded in a moment of victory over 
the Moorish invaders, and with the purpose 
of putting down secret plots of rebellion. 
Jews, pretending to be Catholic converts, 
but continuing their ancient religious 
ceremonies in secret, and cherishing a 
bitterer hatred of Christianity, were to be 
ferreted out. It was argued that this was 
demanded for the sake of the public peace 
and security, and the Inquisition was 
deemed the effective means to the end. 

As a tribunal it had first come into existence 
at the council of Toulouse, in 1229, when 
the Albigenses had been put down and 
a similar state of disorder existed. The 
secret crimes of the Manichseans could be 
dealt with, only by an inquisitorial tribunal 
composed of men expert in detecting the 
heretical opinions which prompted such 
crimes. Thus the first inquisition com- 
mended itself to the law and order party of 



THE INQUISITION. 



169 



the middle ages. And its record suggested 
its usefulness, for their purpose, to 
Ferdinand and Isabella, when the task of 
consolidating their reconquered kingdom 
presented itself. It continued to exist in 
Spain until abolished by Joseph Bonaparte 
at the beginning of the present century. 



Guizot remarks, '"the Inquisition was, at 
first more political than religious, and 
destined rather for the maintenance of 
order than the defence of faith.*' 

History of Civilization, Lecture 11. 

*'In the first place, the Inquisitors were 
royal oflScers. The Kings had the right of 
appointing and dismissing them. * * * The 
courts of the Inquisition were subject, like 
other magistracies, to royal visitors. 'Do 
you not know,' said the King (to Ximenes), 
'that if this tribunal possess jurisdiction, it 
is from the King it derives it?' 

''In the second place, all the profit of the 
confiscations by this court accrued to the 



170 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



King. These were carried out in a very 
unsparing manner. Though the fueros 
(privileges) of Aragon forbade the King to 
confiscate the property of his convicted 
subjects, he deemed himself exalted above 
the law in matters pertaining to this court. 
^ ^ ^ The proceeds of these confiscations 
formed a sort of regular income for the 
royal exchequer. It was even believed, 
and asserted from the beginning, that the 
Kings had been moved to establish and 
countenance this tribunal more by their 
hankering after the wealth it confiscated 
than by motives of piety. 

'*In the third place, it was the Inquisition, 
and the Inquisition alone, that completely 
shut out all extraneous interference with 
the state. The sovereign had now at his 
disposal a tribunal from which no grandee, 
no Archbishop, could withdraw himself. 
As Charles knew no other means of bringing 
certain punishment on the Bishops who had 
taken part in the insurrection of the 
Communidades (or communes that were 



THE INQUISITION. 



171 



struggling for their rights and liberties), he 
cljose to have them judged by the 
Inquisition. ^ * ^ 

•'It was. in spirit and tendency, a x^olitical 
institution. The Pope had an interest in 
thwarting it, and he did so; but the king- 
had an interest in constantly upholding it.'^ 

The Ottoman and Spanish Empires, pp. 78-9, by Leopold 
Ranke . (Ed. Phila . 1545) . 

•'The S^Danish Inquisition, in its i^eculiar 
form, was set up by Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, in the first instance, for the purpose 
of discovering the converts from Judaism, 
who returned to their former creed. * It 
was an institution for stifling sedition as 
well as heresy. Hence, it was defended by 
the Spanish sovereign against objections 
and complaints of the Pope." 

Fisher's History of Reformation, Ch. 11, p. 403. 

''In its earlier stage the Inquisition was 
quite as much a civil as an ecclesiastical 
tribunal, being especially directed against 
the exclusive privileges and immunities 



172 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



claimed by the hereditary nobility; and 
although under Cardinal Ximenes the 
suppression of heresy became one of its 
chief functions it was long regarded with 
no friendly feelings by Rome." 

Encyclopsedia Britannica, Vol. XX.. p. 324. 

In Nicholas Eymerich's '^Official Direc- 
tory of the Inquisition" (A. D., 1567) one 
of the crimes classed as ^'heresy" is selling 
arms or ammunition to the French. 

"It was easy for the King [Philip II., of 
Spain] to employ the forces of one kingdom 
to crush the liberties of the others. And 
Philip possessed a formidable weapon in 
the Inquisition, which he did not scruple 
to use for secular purposes. Political 
independence was crushed with the same 
relentless severity as religious dissent." 

EncyclopEedia Britannica. (Ninth Ed.) Vol. xxii., p. 329. 

The activity of the Holy Office [of the 
Spanish Inquisition] was at first directed 
against the Jews whose obstinate adherence 



THE INQUISITION. 



173 



tu their faith, in spite of persecution, was 
lounished by an edict for their exxDulsion in 
1492. Their deiDarture dei3rived Spain of 
many industrious inhabitants; but its 
importance has been much exaggerated by 
authors who have failed to notice that it 
was followed not by the decline of Spain, 
but by the period of its greatest prosperity.'* 

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ninth Ed., Vol. XXIL, p. 326. 
"Spain." 

"Hefele, in his * Life of Ximenes.' and in 
the article ^^Inquisition:' in Wetzer and 
TTelte. has shown that the methods of the 
Inquisition were, in some resx^ects. less 
cruel than those of the criminal courts of 
the day.'' 

Schaff-Herzog Dictionary. Article on 'TncLuisition." 

*'The Jesuits were from first to last 
obnoxious to the Inquisitions of the 
peninsula. The hostility seen in the arrest 
of St. Ignatius, the persecution of St. 
Francis Borgia, friend of Carranza. the 
arrest of the Provincial, and the attempt to 



174 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



censure the whole Order, in 1586, the 
action against the Bollandists, the persecu- 
tion of Vieyra, the action of the Portuguese 
Inquisition against the Society of Jesus, 
and the burning of Father Malagrida; the 
hostility in all these is too clear and positive 
to be questioned. And, strange as it may 
seem, Jesuits help to swell the numbers of 
the sufferers for whom Llorente, and such 
blind followers as Rule, evoke the tears of 
Protestants. * ^ * Of canonized saints, not 
only St. Ignatius, St. Francis' Borgia, but 
even St. Teresa was denounced by the 
Inquisition. Nor has any Grand Inquisitor 
or official of that later tribunal since the 
origin of Protestantism been beatified or 
canonized by the Church." 

The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. I. p. 629. 



THE JESUITS. 



PROTESTANTISM swept everything 
before it during the first forty years 
of its existence. It acquired a strength and 
an expansion that it has never since attained 
to. For a time France was debatable 
ground. An ambassador of Venice reported 
that nine-tenths of the German people had 
embraced Protestantism (A. D. 1558). 
Scarcely a thirtieth of the population of 
Austria remained Catholics. In Transyl- 
vania the people confiscated all the church 
property. In Poland the Protestants took 
possession of the parish churches and 
obtained a majority in the Diet; in Bohemia 
and Hungary Protestantism was in the 
ascendancy, and there were hundreds of 
thousands of Belgian Calvinists. ''There 
remain firm to the Pope," he continued, ''only 
Spain and Italy with some few islands, and 



176 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



those countries possessed by your Serenity 
in Dalmatia and Greece/' 

A Catholic reaction, or ^^counter refor- 
mation,*' ensued about the middle of the 
sixteenth century, and by the year 1575 the 
reflux wave had entered southern Germany. 
There was a century of conflict ending with 
the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The 
result remains to this day: The entire 
debatable territory was won back by the 
Catholic party; — France and Austria were 
confirmed in the old faith; Belgium, 
Poland, and Southern Germany were 
reconquered. 

To a certain extent this result may have 
been due to a natural re-awakening of the 
Catholic faith among the people; the 
reconquest was certainly aided by princes 
like Duke Albert, of Bavaria, and the 
Emperor Ferdinand, of Austria. After the 
polity of the times, these rulers did not 
scruple to use constraint. But the fact 
remains that the chief element of the 
victory was force of conviction. And the 



THE JESUITS. 



177 



teaching and xDreacliing that produced the 
result was largely that of the Jesuits. 

This new order has its place in the 
history of Europe notably on account of its 
struggle with Protestantism. The original 
design of Loyola, its founder, was to convert 
the Saracens and establish headquarters at 
Jerusalem. But the great order drifted 
from the outset into its appointed work. 

We observe that there was no hurry in 
laying the foundations of the "Society of 
Jesus." After he had conceived the notion, 
Loyola spent several years attending the 
Spanish universities. Here he fell foul of 
the Inquisition, and never after appears to 
have been an admirer of that tribunal; he 
refused, later on, to allow Jesuits to serve on 
it. The year 1534 found him at the 
University of Paris, where he lived inti- 
raately with Peter Faber and Francis 
Xavier. They, and a few Spanish students, 
were his first recruits. The group agreed 
to separate for a time and meet in Venice 
by 1637. At Venice, Ignatius worked 



178 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



among the x30or with Father CarrafPa, who 
afterwards became Po^je. The order was 
formally approved at Rome in 1540. Strict 
obedience to the Pope, and willingness to 
serve the Church, wherever he appointed, 
were elements in the Jesuit plan that 
strongly commended it to the Pontiff. The 
Catholic world needed such an order at 
that time. 

Once approved at Rome, the new organi- 
zation experienced rapid growth. This, too, 
notwithstanding the extended siDecial train- 
ing required of its members. But the plan 
of the order satisfied the best and most 
intelligent religions feeling of the time. At 
Louvain University eighteen young men, 
then in their master's degree, joined the 
Jesuits the first year of its foundation. The 
order at once developed some strong leaders 
like Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, 
Roderigo in Portugal, Peter Canisius in 
Germany, and Francis Xavier. When 
Ignatius, who was its first general, died in 
1556, there were thirteen provinces of the 



THE JESUITS. 



179 



order. Jesuits had penetrated the forests of 
Brazil, and nearly a hundred followers of 
Xavier were at work in India and China. 

The personal merit of the members was one 
source of their popularity and influence. 
The education they provided was gratui- 
tous. Unquestionably, their methods of 
teaching were a great advance upon those 
of the times. Their schools obtained that 
instant prestige which the world knows how 
to give meritorious innovations. Protestant 
pupils left their own universities to attend 
those of the Jesuits. They educated the 
cardinals, the bishops, and the counsellors 
of state, but refused to accept any of these 
dignities themselves. Their preaching drew 
the multitudes to their churches. Their 
care of the sick and interest in the poor 
conciliated the people. Their good man- 
ners made them desired in higher circles. 
They became confessors to the nobles and 
princes. 

The "counter-reformation" in Germany 
was won by calling in the Jesuits. At first 



180 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



they were known as '^Spanish priests;" but 
they established universities and multiplied 
their membership. They swarmed at every 
point of conflict. In one year 40,000 
converts were made in Austria. Bavaria 
was won back after a hard struggle. The 
Rhine provinces were next reconquered. A 
Jesuit was chosen King of Poland. They 
were in every court and council directing 
the movements of Catholic princes. 
Protestantism everywhere recognized its 
new foemen. Melanchthon, on his death- 
bed, in 1560, is reported to have said: 
''Alas! What is this? I see the whole world 
being filled with Jesuits." In England and 
Sweden, severe and sanguinary treatment 
was visited upon them. During one year 
(1670) the Huguenots put forty-nine 
Jesuits to death. But they were not 
deterred. ''They dare everything," said 
their admirers. They entered Russia and 
tried to convert Turkey. Hallam, in his 
"Literature of Europe," notes the multitude 
of leading names that the Jesuits furnished 



THE JESUITS. 



181 



in all departments of thought and 
investigation during the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. They v\Tote the 
books of Latin Europe. 

Francis Xavier and his followers mad.e a 
million converts in India. There were 
750,000 Japanese Catholics in 1610. Father 
Nobili assumed the habit of the priestly 
caste in India — the Brahmins — and induced 
seventy of them to labor with him. In 
Paraguay the Jesuits built up an Indian 
nation and civilized it. In North A merica 
they established a chain of missions 
stretching from Quebec to New Orleans. 

Yet, after the lapse of two hundred and 
thirty-three years, the same authority that 
founded the Jesait order, caused it to be 
suppressed. Pope Clement XIV., to 
^'promote concord in the Church" and 
peace among the nations, abolished the 
order in 1773. The opinion of the world 
had changed. Spain, where the society 



182 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



was cradled, became its bitterest opponent, 
and Austria, whose fortunes the Jesuits had 
served in trying times, concurred in the 
decree. The flood tide of enmity, which the 
Jesuits had been encountering for many 
years, then had its way. 

The order was either too united, too 
virtuous, too astute, or too able to be an 
object of indifference. It aroused the 
jealousy of other orders. Ambitious men 
envied the power it obtained in the civil 
governments. The ''spirit of the age" in 
the eighteenth century was schooled against 
it; the Jesuits stood for the established 
conditions in Church and State. The whole 
force of social and political innovation was 
directed against them. The Jansenists 
— an able, intellectual sect — and the 
Encyclopedists, headed by Voltaire and 
D'Alembert, fought against them. Finally? 
three great political ministers combined to 
crush them: Pombal in Portugal, D'Aranda 
in Spain, and Choiseul in France. The 



THE JESUITS. 



183 



pressure of the Bourbon courts was mainly 
responsible for tlieir suppression. 

Through their two centuries of activity, a 
mass of hostile criticism and detraction was 
accumulated against the Jesuits. They 
were accused of complicity in the 
assassination of Henry III. of France; a 
Jesuit (Father Garnet) was among those 
who paid the penalty of the Grunpowder 
plot: Pombal sought to implicate them in 
an attempt on the life of the King of 
Portugal; D^Aranda made Charles III. of 
Spain believe that they were conspiring to 
depose him in favor of his brother. The 
Dominican order accused them of heretical 
teachings with regard to predestination 
and free will, and with tolerating Pagan 
customs in China. Pascal, in his famous 
^'Provincial Letters," attacked them as lax 
casuists. The Parliament of Paris — their 
inveterate foe — claimed to discover a book 
called the ''Monila Secreta" among their 
effects, which contained alleged rules of a 



184 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



nature very damagino- to the order's 
rex3utation.* 

In all these charges there is more or less 
circumstantial evidence, but a thorough lack 
of conclusive proof. The bankruptcy of a 
commercial house of Martinique served as 
a pretext for suits against the order in 
France which seriously crippled it. 

There were 23,000 Jesuits (of whom 
nearly 12,000 were priests) at the time of 
the suppression, in 1773. The order w^as 
re-established in 1814, and its present 
membership is said to be about 13,000. 



*^In the Order of Jesus was concentrated 
the quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and 
the history of the Order of Jesus is the 
history of the great Catholic reaction. That 
order possessed itself at once of all the 
strongholds which command the public 

*"The credit of the order was, however, far more seri- 
ously damaged by the publication at Cracow, in 1612, of an 
ingenious forgery * * entitled Monita Secreta.^' * * 

Eacyclopeedia Britannica, Vol. XIII., p. 650. 



THE JESUITS. 



185- 



mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the 
confessional, of the academies. Wherever 
Jesuits preached, the church was too small 
for the audience. The name of Jesuit on a 
title page secured the circulation of a book. 
It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the 
powerful, the noble, and the beautiful, 
breathed the secret history of their lives. 
It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the 
youth of the higher and middle classes 
were brought up from childhood to man- 
hood, from the first rudiments to the courses 
of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and 
science, lately associated with infidelity or 
with heresy, now became the allies of 
orthodoxy. Dominant in the South of 
Europe, the great order soon went forth con- 
quering and to conquer. In spite of oceans 
and deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of 
spies and penal laws, of dungeons and racks, 
of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits 
were to be found under every disguise, and 
in every country; scholars, physicans, 
merchants, serving men; in the hostile 



186 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



court of Sweden, in the old manor-bouse of 
Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; 
arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing 
away the hearts of the young, animating the 
courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix 
before the eyes of the dying. 

^' * * The old world was not wide enough 
for this strange activity. The Jesuit in- 
vaded all the countries which the maritime 
discoveries of the preceding age had laid 
open to European enterprise. They were to 
be found in the depths of the Peruvian 
mines, at the marts of the African slave- 
caravans, on the Spice Islands, in the 
observatories of China. They made converts 
in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity 
had tempted any of their countrymen to 
enter; and preached and disputed in 
tongues of which no other native of the 
West understood a word." 

Macaulay's Essaj-s, "Von Ranke's History of Popes." 

"They [the Jesuits] saw, what no others 
of the Catholic Church seemed to have 



THE JESUITS. 



187 



perceived, that a great future was in store 
for the people, and they labored, with a zeal 
that will secure them everlasting honor, to 
hasten and direct the emancipation. By a 
system of the boldest casuistry, by fearless 
use of their private judgment in all matters 
which the Church had not strictly defined, 
and by a skillful employment and expansion 
of some of the maxims of the school men, 
they succeeded in disentangling themselves 
from the traditions of the past, and in 
giving an impulse to liberalism wherever 
their influence extended." 

Lecky's "Rationalism in Europe," Vol. II. p. 147. 

" Such a combination of competent 
knowledge and indefatigable zeal, of study 
and persuasiveness, of pomp and asceticism, 
of world-w^ide influence and unity in the 
governing j)i'i^cipl^? never beheld 

before or since. They were assiduous and 
visionary, worldy wise and flUed with 
enthusiasm, were competent men whose 
society was gladly courted, devoid of personal 



188 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



interest, each laboring for the advancement 
of the rest." 

Sanke. "History of Popes." Book V, p. 169. 

'i ^ ^ In the theory of popular sovereignty 
and of the social compact the peculiar 
tendencies of Catholic theology are most 
apparent. This was advocated by Lainez, 
the second General of the Jesuits, by the 
eminent Spanish Jesuit, Mariana, and by 
Bellarmine. It is the doctrine that power, 
as far as temporal rule is concerned, 
originally resides, by the gift and appoint- 
ment of God, in the people. ^ * 
It is curious to observe the widest 
speculations of Locke, Rousseau, and 
Jefferson, as to the origin of government, 
and the right of revolution were anticipated 
by the Jesuitic scholars of the sixteenth 
century. It is remarkable that in opposition 
to these novel dogmas there appeared on 
the Protestant side a theory of the divine 
right of Kings and the related doctrine of 
passive obedience. * ^ The advocates 



THE JESUITS. 



189 



of freedom and revolt against sioiritual 
authority are equally strenuous for slavish 
maxims of x3olitical obedience.'^ 

Fisher's "History of the Reformation." Ch. 14, pp. 505-6. 

'Llmong the members of this society, and 
among their pupils who were learned by it, 
there is included a long list of men who are 
distinguished for services rendered to 
science and learning.'' 

Id.. Ch. 15, p. 529. 

'•Their system of educational training was 
according to a strict method: but their 
schools were pervaded by their peculiar 
religious spirit. It was largely through 
their influence that the profane or secular 
tone of culture, that had prevailed in the 
cities of Italy, was superseded by a culture 
in which reverence for religion and the 
Church was a vital element." 

Fisher's "History of the Reformation,"' Ch. 11, p. 41.3. 



THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLO- 
MEW'S DAY. 



H E word Huguenot ( oath-bound ) 



1 indicates that the French Protestants 
of the sixteenth century were a closely 
organized community. Their religious 
apostle was Calvin, and their preaching and 
acting was bold, loud, and aggressive. That 
the adherents of the new and the old faith 
should come to blows was inevitable. 
There were not wanting political reasons, 
such as the jealousies existing between the 
houses of Guise and Conde, to bring the 
quarrel to a head. The court of Navarre 
was Protestant; that of France was Catholic, 
and under the influence of the Duke of 
Guise. 

In 1559 transpired what is known as the 
"Conspiracy of Amboise." It was an effort 
of Conde, Coligny, and other Huguenot 




ST. BAETHOLOMEW'S DAY. 



191 



leaders to seize the King (Francis II.) 
and substitute their own influence over him, 
for the Guise influence. This attempt was 
checkmated. But it left both factions 
resting on their arms. 

Three Huguenot rebellions followed, — 
1562, 1567, and 1568, — in all of which they 
were defeated. The conduct of the 
Huguenots, however, tended to exasperate 
the great majority of the nation. They gave 
up the ports of Havre and Dieppe to their 
country's hereditary foes, the English; and 
they invited German guerrilla bands across 
the frontier to pillage Normandy. A 
Huguenot emissary from Orleans assassi- 
nated the Duke of Guise. Once again an 
attempt was made to kidnap the King of 
France at Monceau. Besides these things 
there were, in the x3opular mind, numberless 
instances of Huguenot excess and cruelty. 
Brequimaut, the leader of the reformers, in 
1568, wore a necklace composed of the ears 
of assassinated priests. Baron D'Adrets, 
after taking the fortress of Montbrison, 



192 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



compelled the Catholic prisoners to leap 
from the battlements into the surrounding 
moats, where they were caught on the 
upraised ^ pikes of his soldiers. The 
Afichelade, a massacre of the Catholics of 
Nismes, occurred in 1567; and similar acts of 
violence were perpetrated at Mautauban, 
Valence, and even in Paris. Evidences of 
the burning of churches, plundering of 
monasteries, and hunting of priests were 
but too common. 

These facts furnish some explanation, — 
though no justification — of the frenzy and 
cruelty of the scenes which transpired 
throughout many of the towns of France 
during the latter part of August, and during 
September, 1572. Mobs rose and fell upon 
the Huguenot inhabitants with murderous 
effect. According to Ranke, twenty thou- 
sand persons perished. Lingard estimates 
the number as less than two thousand, and 
he cites the reformed martyrologist, who 
procured lists from the ministers in all the 
different towns, and published the result in 



ST. BAKTHOLOMEW'S DAY. 



193 



1582, .showing the names of only seven 
hundred and eighty-six persons. In their 
varying estimates of the number of victims, 
the majority of French historians do not 2^0 
above 10,000. Even Froude is disposed to 
place the limit at this latter figure.* 

This bloody uprising — called the massacre 
of St. Bartholomew's Day — was all due to 



* Massacres are precisely the events of history over which 
there is the greatest exaggeration. There have been bloody 
reprisals of this kind, like the Sicilian Vespers (A. D. 1282) , 
where over 20,000 French were massacred, that far exceeded 
in fatality that of St. Bartholomew. Victor Hugo says: 
" One man is killed in Paris — it is murder. The throats of 
50,000 people are cut in the East — it is a question." The 
Armenian and Bulgarian atrocities of our own time have cost 
more lives than many of the much-advertised cruelties of 
religious persecution. Much, in fact, depends on who are 
killed rather than on how many are killed. The French 
'"reign of terror" killed nobles with relatives whose lamenta- 
tion roused Europe. Yet.Carlyle says: "This convention, 
now grown anti-Jacobin, did, with an eye to gratify and 
fortify itself, publish lists of what the Reign of Terror had 
perpetrated, lists of persons guillotined. The lists, cries 
splenetic Abbe Mountgaillard, were not complete. They 
contained the names of how many persons thinks the 
reader?— Two thousand all but a few. There were above 4,000 
cries Mountgaillard." — Carlyle, French Revolution. "The 
Guillotine," Book vii., Chap. 6. 



194: MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOEY. 



the apprehensive malice of the Queen 
regent, Catherine de Meclicis, a singular 
woman, Catholic in name, Atheist in belief, 
and accustomed to have Oalvinistic sermons 
read to her during meals. She, it was, who 
fired the mine of religious hate, which other- 
wise might never have exploded, in so 
sanguinary a fashion. She feared the 
political aspirations of Admiral Coligny, 
the Huguenot leader; and by her instigation 
Charles IX. gave the word that Coligny 
should die. The threats of the Huguenot 
chiefs at this outrage were so loud that a 
dangerous uprising was apprehended. It 
was then resolved to exterminate Coligny's 
principal followers, who were at that time 
rendezvoused at Paris. This was done. 
The populace joined in the work, and 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew ensued. 

Charles IX. put a righteous construction 
on his bloody deed, in reporting it to the 
courts of Christendom. He was quick to 
represent it as a stroke of self-defense 
whereby, on a "memorable night, by the 



ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY. 



195 



destruction of a few seditious men. the 
King had been delivered of immediate 
danger of death and the realm from the 
perpetual terror of civil war." These were 
the words of the envoys, and on their 
strength the Pope ordered a ''Te Deum" 
and struck a medal commemorating the 
preservation of Charles IX. *s precious life. 
Even Queen Elizabeth, the great friend 
of the Huguenots, was satisfied by the 
insinuating explanation of the French 
ambassador. 

There was no attempt made to give the 
massacre anything but a political color. 
The only bright circumstance in the 
deplorable occurrence was the action of the 
Archbishop of Lyons and the Bishops of 
Lisieux, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and other 
localities, in sheltering the fleeing Hugue- 
nots and restraining the popular violence. 

Instances are cited of the occasion being 
utilized for private revenge and for plunder. 
Not a few Catholics perished as a 
consequence, among them a priest at 



196 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



Bourges, and a canon of Notre Dame at 
Paris. "The possession of wealth," says 
Mezeray, *'an envied position, or the existence 
of greedy relations, stamped a man as a 
Huguenot." 



"For, beyond all doubt the proceedings of 
the Huguenots, from the conspiracy of 
Amboise, to the battle of Moncontour, had 
given much more trouble to the French 
monarchy than the Catholics have ever 
given to the English monarchy since the 
Reformation; and that too with much less 
excuse." 

Macaulay's Essays. "Hallam." 

It is on account of these things that we 
ought not to be surprised that during many 
years the French Protestants, who affected 
to appeal to the right of private judgment, 
were more intolerant of the exercise of that 
judgment by their adversaries than were the 
Catholics. Thus, while the Catholics were 
theoretically more bigoted than the 



ST. BAETHOLOMEW'S DAY. 197 



Protestants, the Protestants became prac- 
tically more bigoted than the Catholics." 

Buckle's "History of Civilization," Vol. 2, pp. 52-3. London, 
Longman's, Green & Co. 1882. 

"Whatever may be the popular notion 
respecting the necessary intolerance of the 
Catholics, it is an indisputable fact that 
early in the seventeenth century they 
displayed in France a spirit of forbearance 
and a Christian charity to which the 
Protestants could make no pretence." 

Buckle's "History of Civilization." Vol. 2, p. 65. 

" Probably the number of victims [in 
Paris] may have amounted to 6,000, but to 
reduce it as low as 1,600 for all France, 
which Dr. Lingard has done, is monstrously 
absurd. All that we know positively is that 
a certain number of bodies were burned, 
and beyond that all is conjecture. * ^ * If 
it be necessary to choose from these hap- 
hazard estimates, that of De Thou [20,000] 
is preferable from the calm unexaggerating 
temper of the man. But whatever be the 



198 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



number, not all the waters of the ocean can 
efface the stain upon the character of those 
concerned in the massacre. A few of the 
murderers — men of overheated fanaticism 
— may have truly believed they were doing 
God a service by putting heretics to death. 
For these we may feel pity even while we 
condemn. But the majority were imiaelled 
by the lowest of all possible motives — 
jealousy and ambition filled the breast of 
Catharine de Medicis; Anjou was envious 
of merits and virtue. * * * Guise dreamed 
but of revenge. * * * The massacre of St. 
Bartholomew arose out of the paltriest and 
most selfish of motives. * * * The plea of 
religion was never put forward, though it is 
a plea too often employed to extenuate what 
cannot be justified." 

"The Massacre of St. Bartholomew." By Henry White, 
New York. Harper Bros., 1868, pp. 459-62. 

"According to the most moderate calcula- 
tion there fell 2,000 persons in Paris alone, 



ST. BAKTHOLOMEW'S DAY. 



199 



and the number massacred in France was 
not less than 20,000." 

"Civil Wars and Monarchy in France." Leopold Ranke. 
Chap. XV. (last paragraph.) 

The reformed martyrologist adopted a 
measure of ascertaining the real number, 
which may enable us to form a probable 
conjecture. He procured from the ministers 
in the different towns where the massacres 
had taken place, lists of the names of the 
persons who had s»ffered, or were supposed 
to have suffered. He published the result 
in 1582; and the reader will be surprised to 
learn that in afl France he could discover 
the names of no more than seven hundred 
and eighty-six persons. Perhaps, if we 
double that number, we shall not be far 
from the real amount." 

Lingard. "History of England," Vol. VIII., Note 7. 

^'The clergy, in spite of all the ill-usage 
they had received from the heretics, saved 
as many of them as they could in various 
places." 

Fleury, torn. XXXV., Ch. 39, p. 170. 



200 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



When the massacre of St. Bartholomew • 
was first reported at Rome, it was given the 
appearance of a Huguenot insurrection 
against the king, which had been fortunately 
put down. Church authorities naturally 
exhibited that international comity which is 
expected between friendly powers when one 
nation has escaped a political disaster. 
The following extract from Guizot's 
History of France ( Yol. 4, Oh. 33, page 384), 
makes it very clear that .the Poj)e did not 
sympathize with any deed of bloodshed: 

'"When, however, later on a detailed and 
faithful account of the massacre reached 
the Pontiff, he condemned it at once and 
left no doubt as to his horror at the deed. 
"When asked by the Cardinal why he wept, 
Gregory answered, *! weep at the means 
the king used, exceedingly unlawful and 
forbidden by God, to inflict such punish- 
ment. I fear that one will fall upon him, 
and that he will not live very long. I fear, 
too, that amongst so many dead, there died 
as many innocent as guilty.' " 



GALILEO. 



NEARLY two centuries before Galileo, 
the probability of the earth's motion 
around the sun was broached by Cardinal 
Cusa. But the learned world tolerated the 
supposition merely, and held firmly to the 
Ptolemaic, or geocentric theory. About the 
middle of the sixteenth century. Copernicus, 
a Polish priest; published his great work on 
the revolution of the heavenly bodies, and 
the theory was then called the Copernican 
system. The learned world was still 
obdurate; the theory was looked upon as a 
clever guess. 

In 1596 Keppler, ''the founder of modern 
astronomy,"* then teaching at the University 
of Tuebinger, fell foul of the Lutheran 
theological faculty by advocating the 
truth of Copernicanism. These Lutheran 
inquisitors condemned the theory of the 



202 



MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



earth's motion as heretical; and Keppler had 
to quit their university and find refuge in a 
Jesuit college. 

Galileo had his first brush with the 
churchly scientists in 1615. He thought 
he found the Copernican theory to be 
something more than a mere probability, 
and he proceeded to advocate it as an 
established truth. Especially did he 
concern himself with explaining away the 
eternal Biblical nut of his opponents — 
Joshua's order compelling the sun to stand 
stilL This brought him into the full stream 
of exegetical discussion, and certain church- 
men denounced his writings before the 
Bom an Inquisition. We can only remark 
of the Roman Inquisition that it was a 
fallible tribunal, and no wiser than its day. 
Secchi, the astronomer, tells us that ''none 
of the real i3roofs of the earth's rotation 
upon its axis were known at the time 
of Galileo." Not until Reaumer had 
ascertained the velocity of light, and 
Newton, the laws of gravitation, was the 



GALILEO. 



203 



scientific truth of the system established. 
Bacon in England, Descartes in France, 
Tycho-Brah in Germany, and all the 
universities of Europe were contempora- 
neously ignorant of, and prejudiced against, 
Copernicanism equally with the conscien- 
tious Biblical scholars who made up the 
Roman Inquisition. They found that the 
earth's moving about the sun was 
theologically opposed to Holy Writ, and 
they placed the book of Copernicus on the 
Index. Galileo was admonished to let the 
subject rest, and he agreed to do so. 

Subsequently — in 1633 — the matter again 
came before the Inquisition because of a 
book written by Galileo, in which, contrary 
to the command of the Inquisition, he had 
again argued in favor of Copernicanism- 
With the exception of being threatened 
with torture unless he told the truth as to 
his intentions in publishing his book, 
Galileo was well treated during this second 
trial. The Inquisitors, with such wisdom 
as was current in their day, again bolstered 



204 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



up the old Ptolemaic system as the only- 
theory which would accord with Joshua's 
command to the sun, and condemned 
Galileo's teaching as a false opinion, 
opposed to Scripture. 

Galileo was well liked at Rome, the 
then Pope being a personal friend of his. A 
month after his trial he was peacefully 
living at home, pursuing his scientific 
studies and visiting his daughters 
occasionally at a convent in which they 
were cloistered nuns. The only penalty 
imposed upon him was the daily recitation 
of the seven Penitential Psalms. He 
received a pension from the Papal govern- 
ment, and died (1642), as he had lived, a 
very religious man. 

Allegations that * Galileo was tortured by 
the Inquisition, or cast into a dungeon, or 
sentenced to imprisonment, are without 
foundation, and the decrees of the Roman 
Inquisition, while they illustrate the 
fallibility of churchmen, are strenuously 
objected to by Catholics as in no manner 



GALILEO. 



205 



constituting the action of the church, since 
they were neither the decrees of a general 
council nor the ex cathedra promulgations 
of the Pope. 



" The ecclesiastical authorities were 
naturally adverse to express themselves in 
favor of a novel opinion, startling to the 
common mind, and contrary to the most 
obvious meaning of the words of the Bible. 
And when they were compelled to pro- 
nounce they decided against Galileo and 
his doctrines. He was accused before the 
inquisition in 1615, but at that period the 
result was that he was merely recommended 
to confine himself to the mathematical 
reasonings upon the system and to abstain 
from meddling with the Scripture. * * * 
But in 1632 he published his Dialogo, etc. 
* * * I'j^e result was that Galileo was 
condemned for his infraction of the 
injunction laid upon him in 1615. * * * 
This celebrated event must be looked upon 



206 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



rather as a question of decorum than a 
struggle, in which the interests of truth and 
free inquiry were deeply concerned. The 
general acceptance of the Oopernican theory 
was no longer a matter of doubt. Several 
persons in the. highest authority, including 
the Pope himself, looked upon the doctrine 
with favorable eyes, and had shown their 
interest in Galileo's discoveries. They had 
tried to prevent his involving himself in 
trouble by discussing the question on 
Scriptural grounds. * * * Throughout the 
course of the proceedings against him, 
Galileo was treated with great courtesy and 
indulgence. He was condemned to a 
formal imprisonment and a very light 
discipline. * * * It has sometimes been 
asserted or insinuated that Galileo was 
subjected to bodily torture, ^ * but M. Biot 
more justly remarks (Biogr. Universal, Art. 
"Galileo") that such a procedure is 
incredible. To the opinion of M. Biot we 
may add that of Delambre who rejects 



GALILEO. 



207 



the notion of Galileo having been put to 
torture." 

"History of Inductive Sciences" by Wm. Whewell, D.D., 
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. N. Y. D. Appleton & 
Co., 1869, Yol. I., pp. 282-4. 

''The published documents of the trial do 
not sustain the charge that he [Galileo] 
was tortured. He made public recantations 
the next day. The famous legend that, on 
rising from his knees after his recantation 
he exclaimed "e si mouve^ (And yet it 
does moY-e) seems to have no adequate 
foundation." 

Schaff-Herzog Dictionary. Article on "Inquisition." 
Philip Schaff, D.D., Editor Union Theological Seminary, 
N. Y. The Christian Literature Co., Publishers, N. Y., 1888. 

" The Church gives her decisions of 
doctrine, not through the declarations of 
any such tribunals as the Holy Office or the 
Congregation of the Index. These are only 
subordinate working offices or bureaus for 
the expediting of business. They are not 
clothed with her supreme authority. When 
she defines doctrines it is through her 



208 MOOTED QUESTIONS OE HISTORY. 



General Councils and through the voice of 
her Supreme Pontiff, speaking ex cathedra." 

American Cath. Quar. Review, Vol. VII., p. 104. 

On January 10. 1634, Descartes writes to 
Father Marsenne: "Of course, you are 
well aware that Galileo has been up before 
the Inquisition, and his opinion about the 
earth's motion has been condemned as 
heretical. But as I have not yet heard that 
this censure has been authorized by the 
Pope (that is, officially), but merely by a 
congregation of cardinals, I have not yet 
abandoned all hope.*' Gassendi says: "For 
myself, I reverence the decree whereby 
certain cardinals are said to have approved 
of the earth's stationariness. For though 
the Copernicans maintain that these texts 
of Scripture are not to be taken literally — 
nevertheless, since these texts are explained 
differently by men whose authority (as is 
manifest) is so great in the Church, for 
that reason I stand on their side, and do not 
blush on this occasion to hold my intellect 



GALILEO. 



209 



captive. Not that on that account I deem 
it an article of faith; for — so far as I know 
— chat is not asserted by [these cardinals] 
themselves, nor is it promulgated and 
received throughout the ChurchP In 1651, 
Father Riccioli, S. J., writes: "It is not as 
yet of faith that the sun moves and the 
earth remains stationary by reason of the 
Congregational decrees, inasmuch as neither 
the Pope, nor any council approved by him, 
has issued a definition upon this point." 

"Galileo, on Feb. 26, 1616, properly closed 
his case then before the Holy Office. 
Another congregation, that of the Index, 
had taken up the matter, and on March 5th, 
published a general disciplinary rule and 
enactment prohibiting henceforth books 
that upheld the Copernican theory as 
absolute truth, that theory being erroneous 
and contrary to the Holy Scripture, and 
also requiring that such books, already 
published, should be so amended as to 
present the theory in an hypothetical form, 



210 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



or mere theory, not as an established 
positive truth. * * * The congregation of 
the Index acted as it had been declared it 
would act. In 1752 the decree of 1616, 
against teaching Copernicanism as an 
absolute truth, was revoked." 

American Cath. Quar. Review, Vol. VII., p. 94. 

" Still, we may regret that the Congrega- 
tion of the Index did not accept the wise 
councils of Cardinal Barberini, and of 
others agreeing with him, and abstain 
altogether from enacting the decree." 

American Cath. Quar. Review, Vol. VII., p. 113. 



FAWKES, GATES, AND GORDON. 

THREE lurid episodes in the history 
of religious persecution in England 
are the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the 
revelations of Titus Gates (1678-82). and 
the Lord Gordon riots (1780). Each 
has its own significance — the Gunpowder 
plot illustrating to what desperate methods 
persecution may drive bold men: the Gates 
revelations discovering the almost incredible 
gullibility of a bigoted nation and its 
ruthless readiness to revenge its blind fears 
upon the weak minority; and the Lord 
Gordon riots forming an instance of a 
frequent tendency in English Protestantism 
to assert itself in mob uprisings. 

There were scarcely a dozen English 
Catholics in the secret of the Gunpowder 
plot (1605). It was a most desperately 



212 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTOKY. 



formed plan to blow the king, lords, and 
commons of England into eternity, to seize 
the heir to the throne, and to proclaim a 
Catholic protector. It is not probable that, 
in any event, the plot could not have got 
further than the explosion of the thirty-six 
barrels of gun-powder that Guy Fawkes was 
prepared to fire in the vault under the 
Parliament building. A Catholic peer. 
Lord Mounteagle, whom the conspirators 
wished to save from the wreck, was warned 
not to attend Parliament on the day 
appointed; he it was who gave the 
conspiracy away. But the fact that a 
rational Catholic frustrated this nihilistic 
plot of a dozen of his frenzied co-religionists, 
did not save the whole English Catholic 
community. They all felt the heavy hand 
of Protestant resentment. If they had 
ground for complaint before the fifth of 
November, 1605, they were given double 
ground for mourning after that date. They 
had expected better things of James L 
when he came to the English throne in 



FAWKES, GATES, AND GOEDON. 



213 



1603; his mother had been a Catholic, and 
Catholics had bled in her defense. James 
might at least suspend the harsh laws 
against the poor Papists, but he did not. 
All the fines for not attending Protestant 
worship were freshly enforced against them; 
twenty pounds a month, and a forfeiture of 
two-thirds of their goods, if the fine remained 
unpaid, was the penalty, and a horde of 
Scotch court followers were enriched by it. 
The Catholics of England were pauperized. 
Every man connected with the Gunpowder 
plot — especially Robert Catesby, the real 
instigator of it — had suffered personally for 
his religion. Disappointment, despair, and 
resentment were the feelings that possessed 
them. Henry IV. of France advised James 
that while these men must be punished, he 
should recognize the evil of persecution in 
driving men to such deeds, and goad the 
Catholics no farther. This wisdom was too 
advanced for the English parliament of 
that day. Tliey enacted additional penal 
laws, debarring Catholics from the practice 



214: MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



of law or surgery, from residing in London, 
and from acting as executors. Catholic 
parents were fined a hundred pounds for 
every child they failed to have baptized as a 
Protestant, and the king was empowered to 
seize, if he desired, two-thirds, of the goods 
of Catholics failing to attend Protestant 
worship. James exercised this power by 
granting to his favorites the right of 
'^making profit" out of certain specified 
nobles. The Earl of Northumberland was 
fined ^300,000. 

One feature of the Gunpowder plot was 
the attempt to connect the Jesuits with it. 
The Jesuit provincial, Father Garnet, was 
executed because it appeared that he had 
some knowledge of the existence of the 
conspiracy, indirectly obtained under seal 
of the confessional. It was claimed for him 
that he had done all in his power to 
dissuade the desperate men from their 
purpose. The oiffense charged against him 
was his being privy to the plot and not 
revealing it; he contended that the secrecy 



FAWKES, OAKES, AND GORDON. 215 



of the confessional obliged him to refrain 
from turning informer. 

The influence of this plot affected the 
imagination of succeeding generations of 
Englishmen. Jesuits and plotting Papists 
were credited with every dire and damaging 
occurrence. The air of England for two 
centuries was surcharged with prejudice 
against them. When two-thirds of London 
was burned, in 1666, the catastrophe was 
placed at the door of the Catholics, and the 
pillar erected to commemorate the great fire 
bore that groundless charge against them 
for nearly two hundred years.* (It was 
finally erased in 1830 by order of the 
London aldermen.) 

The stories perpetrated by Titus Oates in 
1678 against the Catholics, pandered to this 
deep-rooted, gullible, and insensate preju- 
dice. Oates was an adventurer of bad 



Pope makes reference to this circumstance in these lines ; 
"Where London's column pointing to the skies 
Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." 



216 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



character; his success and the gratitude he 
evoked by "his providential disclosures," 
induced other adventurers to follow his 
example. One of these was a convict 
named Bedloe; another was a young man 
named Dangerfield, who had been convicted 
of numerous crimes; there were a dozen in 
all, some of them imported from Ireland, 
to prove the existence of a Popish plot 
there. All united in alleging that there 
was a Catholic conspiracy to murder the 
king, massacre the Protestants, and bring in 
a French army of subjugation. There were 
numerous variances, contradictions, and 
inconsistencies in the testimony of these 
men, but their explanation that they were 
sick," or "did not recollect clearly," or "were 
mistaken in the details," were accepted by 
the gullible public. The killing of Godfrey, 
a magistrate before whom Oates had made 
his deposition, was the circumstance which 
first gave credibility to the disclosures. It 
was never discovered who killed Grodfrey, 
but the Jesuits had immediate credit for it. 



FAWKES, OAKES, AND GORDON. 217 



Then began a series of prosecutions running 
through several years, and resulting in the 
execution o£ a large number of Catholics, 
among them twenty-four priests and several 
noblemen. The evidence against these men 
is now admitted to have been the purest 
fabrication on the part of the brood of 
informers whom Oates' success had stimu- 
lated. At one time several thousand 
Catholics were jailed and nearly thirty 
thousand of them expelled from London. 
The duke of York (subsequently James 
II.) was forced into exile; the Queen 
herself was accused by Oates; and a 
measure was passed by which the Catholic 
peers were excluded from the House of 
Lords — to which they did not again return 
for one hundred and fifty years. Political 
leaders, like Shaftsbury, fomented the plot 
for partisan reasons, whether they credited 
it or not. There were undoubtedly many 
persons, aside from the Catholics, who saw 
the entire falseness of the imposture, but 
the mob spirit carried them off their feet or 



218 MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY. 



silenced them. Sir William Temple was 
threatened by Lord Fairfax for doubting 
the justice of executing certain priests. 
''He would tell everybody I was a Papist, 
afSrming that the plot must be handled as 
if it were true^ whether it was so or no.-'* 
Such was this sanguinary hoax which for 
five years imposed on the English nation, 
dealing death to the innocent and control- 
ling the politics of the court and commons. 
Oates was finally brought to justice, 
exposed, and severely punished, but he 
lived long enough to be pardoned and 
pensioned when William of Orange came 
to. the throne. 

Towards the year 1780 there was a 
disposition on the part of the English 
parliament to relieve Catholics and 
dissenters from some of the grievous 
penalties under which they were placed. 
Protestant associations were formed 
throughout England to defeat that 



* Temple, Vol. II., p. 506. 



FAWKES, OAKES, AND GORDON. 219 



disposition and to rivet the shackles. Lord 
George Gordon was President of these 
associations. Parliament paying little at- 
tention to their petitions, the Protestant 
Associations were ordered by Gordon to 
come in a great body and present their 
petition en masse. Out of their assemblage 
developed a numerous London mob, which, 
inflamed by fanatics, and inspired by the 
pillage of liquor stores, started to purge 
London of the Papists. For several days 
they had the metropolis of England more or 
less in their power. The prisons were 
opened and the thief, the robber, and the 
incendiary came out to aid the cause. At 
one time thirty-six fires were raging within 
the city limits. Houses were looted and 
property was destroyed. The riots were 
finally put down by calling in the military 
forces. Lord Gordon went free of punish- 
ment, owing to the skillful defense of 
Erskine. His erratic carreer was topped off 
by his conversion to Judaism in 1793, just 
prior to his death. 



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